Looking at the quality of life today, not the future, and comparing it with the pre independence era, material comfort is definitely incomparable. The convenience of life has improved tremendously at this point in time, putting aside the extremely high cost of living that is building up daily. PAP has a glorious past record and chalked up a lot of goodwill among the older generations. Until the year 2000, political analysts could have concluded that this party would go on and be elected for the next 100 years. As a political party, it has done very well to uplift the material comfort of the people, education, healthcare, safety and security, to the envy of countries around the world. The citizens really have very little to complain about.
And don’t forget it has so much money stashed away as the nation’s reserves. Just by spreading this money to the people to make their lives better would assure their reelection year after year. But that is not necessary. The money can be used to pay their top salaries and the salaries of those managing this money and the Sinkies would not care a damn, if only they stop squeezing them with higher housing, medical and the price to own a car. They have no reason, with so much money in the reserves to want to squeeze the people for their last drop of blood and leading to a lost of faith in their leadership. Funny thing is that they chose to do it this way.
In less than 15 years things have changed so dramatically. There is now so much anger against the party due to so many bad policies affecting the lives of the citizens, and going forward is really not looking pretty. Of course the PAP does not think so and still thinking it is doing all the right things and very proud of their achievements.
The opposition parties have been trying very hard to bring down the PAP, or at least challenging its dominant position in the polity but could barely make any inroads. But what the opposition parties failed to do, the PAP and its super talents did very well, to erase all the goodwill built over the years by the earlier leaders and creating so much negativity towards the party. The support of the people is at the lowest level the party has ever hit. It requires exceptional talents to do this, to self destruct, singlehandedly, without the opposition having to do much. This calls for really exceptional talents to do it so successfully.
The commonly acknowledged distribution of voters is 30% opposition, 30% PAP and 40% swing votes. This pattern has shifted quite ostensibly in recent years. The 40% middle of the road voters are actually for the opposition but voting for the PAP because they have no choice due to lack of good opposition candidates. But this is changing. The mindset is that any decent opposition candidate will do, will be better than top grade scholars and top earning professionals. It thus reads 70% for the opposition. Scary right?
What about the 30% hard core PAP supporters? This number is also shaky. Other than maybe 10% that would not switch come what may, the balance 20% voted PAP for vested interests. And if they think PAP is not going to serve them well, some of them may switch camps quite easily. They are political animals and only think of their own interests. The actual supporters for the PAP could be very small in reality and could be less than 30%. A big shift can happen anytime if the PAP is not careful. The PAP can no longer expect the people to be on its side anymore, there is no certainty like in the past.
Thanks to the super talents in the PAP to bring the PAP to this sad state of affair. It is no small feat to do it. It is unbelieveable but the super talents in the PAP have delivered the PAP support to the opposition. They are making it so much easier for the opposition parties.
This is how I see it. Please feel free to disagree.
Chua Chin Leng AKA RedBean
*The writer blogs at http://mysingaporenews.blogspot.com/