After the patriarch

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

The mourners keep coming

LEE KUAN YEW died on March 23rd after spending 47 days in intensive care. His son and prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, told the country that Singapore will not see a man like him again. Its first prime minister had “fought for independence, built a nation where there was none and made us proud to be Singaporeans”. After a family wake, the patriarch’s body lay in state on March 25th. Singaporeans came in huge numbers to pay respects: by the afternoon the queues wound all around downtown Singapore, with an eight-hour wait to file past the coffin. Elsewhere, at designated sites, people left flowers, cards and balloons. A typical note read: “Thank you for all the sweat and tears you’ve shed for the building of our nation.”

Another tribute to Mr Lee’s nation-building was the absence of any flicker from the stockmarket on news of his death. True, Mr Lee had not been prime minister for 25 years, and he had been out of government entirely since 2011. But Singapore sits in a region rife with political instability and corruption. By contrast, and thanks largely to Mr Lee, Singapore’s institutions are strong, its governance honest, effective—and dull.

Yet slowly and unmistakably, its controlled politics is changing. When Mr Lee pulled tiny Singapore out of its union with Malaysia, it was poor and faced long odds. Today Singaporeans are well-educated and well-travelled, while GDP per head is among the world’s highest. Having grown up in a rich country, young Singaporeans increasingly chafe at restrictions their grandparents willingly accepted. Public protests remain rare. (One place where they are partly tolerated, Hong Lim Park’s Speakers’ Corner, was closed this week “for remembering” Mr Lee.) But complaining, criticising and venting frustrations on social media are increasingly common.

Rising expectations have already produced popular discontent, or what passes for it in Singapore. The People’s Action Party (PAP), which Mr Lee founded, has governed without interruption since before Singapore became a republic in 1965. But in the most recent general election, in 2011, the PAP posted its worst-ever performance, winning just 60% of the popular vote—6.5 percentage points less than it took in 2006 (though thanks to clever boundary-drawing, it still won 81 of 87 elected seats).

Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore

That election, says Kenneth Paul Tan at the Lee Kuan Yew School for Public Policy, showed the government that “citizens’ views really do matter” and that the old paternalist model of politics that assumed Singaporeans could see no further than their narrow self-interest no longer holds.

Especially since that election, the government has made a point of listening to citizens rather than just lecturing them. Our Singapore Conversation, an initiative launched in 2012, has held more than 660 “dialogue sessions” across the country, during which Singaporeans have discussed their views on government policies. Such programmes may be largely symbolic, but they at least show government openness. And, Mr Tan argues, they help develop the civic and democratic values that years of paternalism had discouraged.

That is a long-term transformation. In the nearer term, the PAP must contest another election—it will probably call one for later this year. No one seriously expects it to lose. At the recent launch of a new political party, Singaporeans First, opposition leaders conceded that Mr Lee’s death and Singapore’s 50th anniversary celebrations in August will boost the ruling party.

But a party does not have to lose to change. In recent years the PAP has overcome its aversion to welfare programmes, expanding financial aid to the elderly and directing more benefits to poorer Singaporeans. It has tried to use persuasion rather than bullying in meeting popular discontent over high rates of immigration and concerns over whether Singapore’s forced-savings scheme can meet the needs of an ageing population. In his time, Lee Kuan Yew would have done it differently. But the times are changing.

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