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Lee
Hsien Loong wins Bad Democrat Award
2 Jun
06
We
hope it will be taken the right way if we suggest that, in
choosing Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore's prime minister, as the
winner of the seventh Bad Democracy Award, you, dear readers of
openDemocracy, are coming to resemble Holden
Caulfield,
the disenchanted iconoclast of JD Salinger's The
Catcher in the Rye.
It
is not the sheer violence of the world that outrages you - you
have spurned such fiends as Robert Mugabe and Islam Karimov. You
did not punish the ruinous but apparently heartfelt zeal
of Tony Blair or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
No, the political
trait that leaves you apoplectic with wrath - that which marks
the Berlusconis,
the Howards
and the Lukashenkos
of this world - is
the same that riled young Holden.
Lee is keen to be seen
as a democrat. He talks
like a democrat. He
holds elections.
But,
beneath that thin veneer, he and the party he leads, the People's
Action Party (Pap),
have not the faintest inclination to bend to the will of the
Singaporean people.
In May's elections, the Pap scooped
eighty-two of the
country's eighty-four seats, thirty-seven of which were won
uncontested. An outpouring of electoral adoration for Lee? We
fear not.
His father, Lee
Kuan Yew,
Singapore's first prime minister who governed with an
iron-fistful of dollars for thirty-one years reproached those who
did not vote for the Pap as "ungrateful".
Just
to ensure that voters were clear where to direct their gratitude
for the Lee dynasty's selfless service, Lee Snr sued
Chee Soon Juan,
leader of the Singapore
Democratic Party,
claiming that his campaigning amounted to "defamation".
In a battling but futile repost, Chee
has lodged an
application to have the election declared void,
on the grounds that his activists say they witnessed government
officials doling out cash to prospective voters and telling those
Singaporeans who live in public housing - about 85% of them -
that investment in their estates would run dry if the local Pap
was not returned.
"Politics in Singapore is still
very primitive. Fear pervades society."
Intimidation
may be conducted with more elan here than in nearby Burma or
Indonesia, but nonetheless, Chee argues, dissenters are cowed.
He has been bankrupted by the litigious Lees. All the
same, his party won 23% of the vote in May - in spite of
intimidation that saw hotels refuse to host his press conferences
and printers too terrified to ink his leaflets.
"Politics
has become a crime, human rights is taboo", he says. "The
entire atmosphere is poisoned."
Plainly, this is not
the height of democratic behaviour. But, the argument goes, what
is a little opposition-bashing when Singapore, a city-state with
a population of just 4.5 million, has blossomed into the
fifty-fourth largest economic
entity
on the planet, with
a GDP bigger than Ireland's and a turnover in excess of
Citigroup's? Shouldn't Singaporeans stop grumbling about a spot
of disenfranchisement and just get on with living their fabulous
lives?
"If that were true, why is the government so
scared?" Chee asks. "If we are all more prosperous, the
government should have no problem with free elections.
"But
why do they sue oppositionists? They already control all the
media, but why did they ban
podcasting and
blogging
for the nine days
of the election campaign?
"Yes, Singapore has more
prosperity. But you have to ask: prosperity for who?"
A
pertinent question - especially when one recalls that Singapore
is held up as the glinting model of the "Asian values"
by which tough governments deliver their people from poverty.
A
recent report in the Asia
Times
found that all may
not be rosy enough in Singapore for Lee to rely on the sheer
adulation of a wadded electorate to keep him in power.
Since
the Asian financial crisis bit in 1997, the gap between rich and
poor has widened dramatically.
While Singapore has the world's fastest growing number of
millionaires,
the poorest have seen their incomes halve over the past
decade.
The rising tide, as we are incessantly reminded by
those who badger governments to keep their noses out of
free-wheeling economies, is supposed to lift all boats. It is
odd, then, that Lee recently told many of the most needy among
his flock that their boats may soon be scuppered, coolly
informing them that the unemployment rate was set to rise.
What's more, in his drive to court foreign investment at
all costs, Lee has not seen fit to provide a minimum wage or
anything else to soften the buffets to the remaining
non-millionaires.
As he swore in his new cabinet on 30
May, Lee made all the right compassionate noises, prompting
Denise Phua, a Pap MP, to gush:
"What is most impressive to me is that he always promises us
that no one will be left behind and I'm very interested in this.
I hope to be able to contribute to this end as part of his
team."
You get the impression that the burgeoning
legions of young unemployed and those who work their fingers to
the bone for a pittance in a country whose leaders never stop
telling them that they've never had it so good have heard that
one before.
Click here
to read Mr Lee's
letter of congratulation from openDemocracy for winning May's Bad
Democracy award
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