Singapore’s New Prime Minister Entangled In Old Politics – Analysis
By Michael Barr
For Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) government, the best news of 2024 came in May, when then prime minister Lee Hsien Loong (72) handed the premiership to his handpicked successor, Lawrence Wong (then 51).
Lee’s succession plans had been the nagging background story in Singapore politics since 2016. After a painful journey replete with a disastrous first choice of successor, compounded by years of procrastination, the result has been a camera-friendly new prime minister who presents the reassurance of continuity and competence supplemented by a veneer of generational change and youthful energy.
The rest of 2024 continued the narrative of 2023, in which most political stories were negative developments that the government needed to manage, rather than positive developments that it could exploit.
The least edifying stories were those about elite politics, in which story after story featured the government devoting the resources and the time of the cabinet, the parliament, the Attorney-General’s Chambers and the police variously pursuing Lee Hsien Loong’s private agenda against his siblings, prosecuting the Leader of the Opposition and cleaning up the ruling elite’s dirty laundry.
More mundane was the December news that two cabinet ministers are suing Bloomberg for its reporting of transactions related to their personal residential properties, which totalled nearly $120 million Singapore dollars (US$88.2 million). The Singapore press managed to report the libel action without mentioning the value of the ministers’ real estate portfolios.
One of the lowest points for the government in 2024 was the conviction in October of a former senior cabinet minister, S Iswaran, on corruption charges. The conviction came only after the original charges were downgraded to those that would apply to a civil servant who had not declared a gift. At least Iswaran faced jail time. In 2023, after the US Department of Justice caught six senior executives of a Singapore-based government-linked company paying US$55 million in bribes, the company was fined US$422 million but the executives were not charged or publicly identified due to ‘lack of evidence’.
An even lower depth was plumbed with the news, also released in October, that the UK government had granted Lee Hsien Loong’s younger brother, Lee Hsien Yang, political asylum.
Hsien Yang was in a property dispute with his brother over the estate of their late father, former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew. Even though Lee Hsien Loong did not contest his father’s will — in which Lee Kuan Yew explicitly stated his wish to demolish the family home — the Singapore state has deployed the power of the cabinet, the parliament, the police, the Urban Redevelopment Authority and the Building and Construction Authority to advance Lee Hsien Loong’s agenda of turning the family home into a memorial to his father and himself.
The conflation of public and private interest is nothing new, with members of founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew’s family routinely occupying senior positions in government-linked corporations and Singapore’s two sovereign wealth funds. He also had a record of publicly justifying policy changes by referencing the lived experience of his children, and more than once introduced educational innovations that happened to benefit his children and grandchildren. But earlier generations of politicians in Singapore kept tighter control of the narrative and kept the discretionary acts of self-interest within tighter bounds. Today’s leaders seem to think they can maintain control of the narrative while flaunting their deployment of state power in pursuit of private agendas. This is a significant turning point in Singapore’s pattern of governance, since it subordinates the common good to self-interest.
Singapore’s ruling elite has never been shy about pursuing self-interest while in office as long as no laws were broken and no conflicts of interest became subjects of common gossip – a standard that was easy to maintain because of the complete absence of any laws or conventions requiring political office holders to declare their financial interests, assets or conflicts of interest. Lee Hsien Loong’s successor could make his mark by resurrecting these modest standards while policing the precedent set by Iswaran’s plea bargain, requiring the declaration of ‘gifts’ to government ministers.
Lawrence Wong arrived in office as Lee Hsien Loong’s protege. His political apprenticeship consisted of three years working closely with Lee as his Principal Private Secretary. Since stepping up as prime minister, Wong has indicated that he wants to make changes, but this will not be easy while Lee Hsien Loong continues to sit in Cabinet as Senior Minister.
So far, the primary assertion of Wong’s independence has been his choice of deputy prime ministers in May. Wong chose two men a generation older than himself, neither of whom could challenge or undermine his leadership. But he was unable to replicate this pattern in the December 2024 election of the powerful Central Executive Committee of the PAP, where Wong was elected secretary-general but is flanked by two assistant secretaries-general who were his rivals in the race to be prime minister.
If Wong is looking to both stake a claim to leadership and rein in the culture of self-interest and self-absorption, a decisive first step would be to end the Singaporean state’s partisan involvement in the Lee family feud. Continuing with business as usual will confirm that Lee is still the boss.
- About the author: Michael Barr is Associate Professor of International Relations at Flinders University. He is author of ‘The ruling elite of Singapore: networks of power and influence’ and ‘Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-Building Project’.
- Source: This article is published by East Asia Forum and is part of an EAF special feature series on 2024 in review and the year ahead.