Next month, the city-state of Singapore will get a new prime minister – the first time in 20 years, given that the current prime minister, 72-year-old Lee Hsien Loong, took office in 2004.
On May 15, he will be replaced at the helm of a physically small but economically extremely strong country known for its electronic industry, banking, oil refineries and top education, on May 15 by a close associate, Deputy Prime Minister Hueng Suen Tsai, better known to the public by his anglicized name Lawrence Wong.
Exemplary (un)democracy
Since becoming an independent country in 1965, Singapore, which already earned the nickname “Asian Tiger” in the 1980s thanks to its well-designed rapid economic development, has had only three prime ministers.
The current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is the son of the father of the nation Lee Kuan Yew, a lawyer who held the prime minister’s chair for a quarter of a century (1965–1990) and continued to influence the formulation of government policy for another two decades in the capacity of “senior minister” and “mentor minister”. “.
Lee Kuan Yew was also the Prime Minister of Singapore in the period from 1959 to 1963, when that city was part of Malaysia, and when he stepped down from the Prime Minister’s office in 1990, he was the Prime Minister with the longest tenure in the world.
It was during the technocratic government of Lee Kuan Yew that Singapore became a model in East Asia of careful planning and wise investment, technological progress and good discipline, i.e. public order. At the same time, especially in the West, it became known for its unusual laws, including the one that prohibits oral sex and draconian punishments.
And while there are commentators in the West who question the existence of democracy in Singapore, given the traditionally long rule of members of the Lee family and bureaucrats very close to them, due to its capitalist system, openness to Western economic interests and American military effectiveness, and its extremely important geographical location on the edge of the Straits of Malacca from where tankers and other shipping en route to China, the Republic of Korea and Japan can be easily monitored, Singapore has not in the past been subject to the strong official criticism of the lack of democracy that many other countries suffer from Washington.
By the way, between the reigns of father and son Lee, in the period from 1990 to 2004, the position of prime minister was Go Chok Tong, who, despite considerable problems such as the Asian financial crisis and the SARS epidemic, continued to lead the city-state well. , as well as his successor Lee Hsien Loong. So, for example, in 2022, Singapore had a fantastic gross domestic product of as much as 80,000 US dollars per capita, which makes it one of the richest countries in the world.
A pre-planned shift
Like Singapore’s second Prime Minister Goh, the new Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, although he is an extension of the Lee dynasty, comes from an ordinary bourgeois family and is not related to the Lee family.
It is interesting that it has been known for at least two years that the fifty-one-year-old Wong will succeed Lee Hsien Loong, because the latter announced in April 2022 that Wong will be the fourth generation leader of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP). Namely, Lee, like his father, intended to leave the post of prime minister by his 70th birthday, but the epidemic of the new coronavirus disrupted his plan.
Asian media estimate that the main reason for choosing the economist Wong as his successor is precisely his good work in the position of finance minister during the crisis caused by the coronavirus epidemic.
Wong, as the new leader of the ruling party, is expected to hold general elections later this year. In the Singapore Parliament, in addition to the representatives of the ruling PAP, the right-leaning centrist party, there are also delegates from the Workers’ Party and the Progressive Party of Singapore.
Future challenges for the new prime minister and his government
When it comes to the challenges weighing on the citizens of Singapore and which Wong will have to face as prime minister, the biggest ones are the extremely low birth rate and the high cost of living and raising children, and the increasingly difficult struggle with neighboring countries to attract foreign capital.
Namely, last year Singapore recorded the lowest birth rate in its history of only 0.97 children per woman of reproductive age. In order to maintain the population at the same level, it is necessary for the country to have a birth rate of 2.1 children per woman.
In January of this year, the Singapore Institute for Policy Studies conducted a survey that showed that as many as 70 percent of young respondents in their twenties and early thirties do not plan to marry, which, according to demographers, will further undermine the country’s birth rate.
Singapore is a major destination for foreign migrants, mainly Indonesians and Indians, and as such can count on having a sufficient labor force despite a steep decline in the birth rate and an aging population. Despite this, the authorities of that city, where three quarters of the population are Chinese, have been inviting young people for a long time and offering them financial incentives to start a family.
Singapore, which until now has been a kind of tax haven for foreign companies, this year will have to, in accordance with the international agreements it has signed, introduce higher levies for foreign companies, while countries in the region such as Malaysia and Thailand, which are otherwise attractive due to lower operating costs, they simultaneously bring new packages to stimulate the arrival of foreign corporations. This could lead to the relocation of regional headquarters and branches of large foreign companies from Singapore.
A special (external) problem is the geopolitical uncertainty in the region, i.e. the increasingly strong political, economic and military confrontation between the great powers of the USA and the People’s Republic of China, which, especially in the South China Sea, on the edge of which the Malay Peninsula and Singapore are located, brings great unrest and makes it difficult investment and trade. Singapore, whose economy is highly dependent on the smooth flow of capital and port operations, i.e. strong international trade exchange, is extremely sensitive to the trend of economic separation of the US and its Asian political allies from China and political instability in the South China Sea.
An obvious recent example of the damage that this country with about six million inhabitants can suffer due to the friction between Washington and Beijing is the recent the banning of the Chinese app Tik-tok in the USthat is, the order to sell that social network to an American company, since the branch of the company “Tik-tok” for business abroad is based in Singapore.
