Wednesday, May 24, 2006
The Singapore GE 2006 - Post Mortem
Yup, the GE's gone dead, like most previous GE... time to rip it apart and find out what killed it... nah... I'm no political analyst...
This was the title of yesterday's forum organised by the NUSS. I attended it. Mainly because Uncle John's review on the pre-election forum was good.
It was at best, an interesting forum. Hardly a post mortem, but nevertheless interesting.
There was Dr Catherine Lim, who needs no introduction, Miss Denise Phua a youngling of our ruling party, Mr Perry Tong and Dr Chee from the remaining opposition and A/P Ho Khai Leong, a political commentator (I didn't know we have that till lastnight.)
Dr Lim told two short stories, Perry tried to summarise the WP's rally in 10 minutes, Dr Chee complained that his pictures in the papers did not look good, and Denise tried to justify that 66.6% is a good mandate.
The audience, as it slowly dawned on me during the Q&A session was peppered with SDP hecklers. (I thought some of them looked familiar.)
I enjoyed Dr Lim's stories on head versus heart. Very encouraging stories. Her message was that the political paradigm in Singapore is shifting. I am very encouraged by that message. It does not matter to me who rules Singapore, the paradigm is and has to shift. We have to be prepared for it.
Denise came closest to a post mortem of the GE. She tried to justify why 66.6% was a good mandate and what her party could have done to improve on the results. I am not impressed.
66.6% in not a good mandate, not in Singapore. She said that in a typical first world country, there will be a third that is pro-government, a third that is pro-opposition and a third swing voters. And since they won 66.6%, they've won the votes of the swing voters, hence a strong mandate.
Well, I am sad to say that this is not true in the context of Singapore.
We do not have a credible opposition in Singapore. So all I can say is, we saw more than 33% worth of protest votes. Okay, maybe among all these, we do have a few that truly believe that the opposition is credible, but I doubt there are many of them. Then there is the fear factor... you can say it doesn't exist, but if you search yourself deep enough, you know that it is there. Not many can overcome this factor. It is a factor that will swing fence sitters anywhere.
Perry, I think he went to the wrong forum... there was no analysis whatsoever, yes, he chose to call this a post GE review, but then again, there was no review coming from him either.
Dr Chee, he painted a very bleak picture of the GE, told stories about how the SDP was harrassed by the gahmen officials and then tried to substantiate his whinings of an unfair election by quoting a survey from his Think Centre website.
Hey doc, only people who are not happy with the gahmen goes to your website. No credibility there, sorry. You're not really photogenic either, so don't complain that the press didn't publish good pictures of you.
Prof Ho's part... okay, sorry I needed to pee and missed a good part of it.
Then came the Q&A part. I don't know if it was just me, but it seems that most questions were ruling party bashing questions and they seemed skewed towards the Dr Chee's canp. It was like, he planted people in the audience to ask barbed questions... perhaps it was just me.
I left the forum entertained... it wasn't a post mortem I expected, but well, I can't ask for more. It was indeed entertaining.
# Crapped by Toadjuice on 5/24/2006 09:21:00 am
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