Lessons from Across the Causeway

The Ruling Elite of Singapore must have been closely following and analyzing the general elections in Malaysia; and for good reasons. Afterall, there should be a lot of similarities between the socio-economic and political culture between two neighbouring countries that were once part of a larger state. The BN is like PAP's counterpart in Malaysia and like in Singapore, the media in Malaysia has also always been the ruling government's mouthpiece.

The commentary on this Saturday's Straits Times predicted that the worst case scenario of the elections for the BN is the situation where the BN just manages to keep a two third majority in the parliament. The person who wrote this would probably have fallen off his chair when the results came out to be far worse than his worst case scenario as BN actually secured only more than 50% of the parliament seats. This means that BN now cannot change the constitution and pass laws as it wishes.

What is interesting is that BN's setback came despite delivering an economic growth of more than 6% in 2007, a good performance by any measure. Apparently, pure economic growth is not sufficient to keep the people happy and it is not just the Chinese and Indian minorities who are voting against BN or BN would not have lost so many seats. There are apparently other issues which are of concerns to all ethnic groups, including the Malays for example growing income disparity, the feeling that the government has lost touch with the ground, corruption, inflation and the dismal state of law and order. Of all these issues, the widening income gap and the feeling of alienation appear to be applicable to Singapore as well. If there is one lesson that our Ruling Elite should take away from Malaysia's general elections, it is that delivering solid economic growth; which has been the Ruling Elite's main definition of a successful and good government is no guarantee for winning the hearts and minds of people.