Singapore’s election battle lines set as body increases seats, redraws hot wards

Singapore has redrawn its electoral boundaries, expanding the number of parliamentary seats and realigning wards that were previously hotly contested, as the country inches closer to a critical general election. The changes were announced on Tuesday in a new electoral boundaries report, meant to take into account shifts in voter population, completing yet another step in the lead-up to a general election that must be held by November. The Electoral Boundaries Review Committee (EBRC) report said there would be 33 electoral divisions in the next election, up from 31 in 2020. Fifteen will be single-seat constituencies, while 18 will be multi-seat ones, up from 14 and 17, respectively. This will increase the number of seats in parliament to 97 from 93. Prime Minister Lawrence Wong will be seeking a mandate for his leadership for the first time since he was selected by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) in 2022 to take over from Lee Hsien Loong, son of founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew. Wong had gained prominence for his work on the country’s Covid-19 taskforce. He was sworn in to the top post in May last year. In the latest report, several constituencies in the west, east and northeast regions of the city state have been redrawn. These hotspots were where the PAP faced its toughest competition from opposition parties the Workers’ Party and the Progress Singapore Party in 2020. Significant changes have been made in West Coast, where the PAP recorded its narrowest victory margin in 2020, with 51.68 per cent of the vote. The multi-seat constituency has been redrawn to include areas previously in Jurong, forming the West Coast-Jurong West GRC. In 2020, the Jurong team, led by current President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, achieved the PAP’s largest victory margin with 74.61 per cent of the vote. West Coast GRC was led by former transport minister S Iswaran, who resigned from his post last year after being convicted of bribery-related charges. Some areas previously in West Coast GRC, including Dover and Telok Blangah, have been moved to Tanjong Pagar, a PAP stronghold where Lee Kuan Yew served as MP from 1955 until his death in 2015. The Bukit Batok single seat, where chief of the Singapore Democratic Party Chee Soon Juan ran in 2020 and announced he intended to run again, no longer exists. The ward has been merged with parts of Hong Kah North, Yuhua and Jurong to form a new five-seat GRC – Jurong East-Bukit Batok. The committee attributed the change to new housing developments in the area. In the east, Marine Parade and East Coast, where the Workers’ Party has been active, have also undergone changes. The former Marine Parade GRC has absorbed the single seat in MacPherson and some regions in Potong Pasir and Mountbatten, and will now be known as Marine Parade-Braddell Heights GRC. East Coast GRC, helmed by Heng Swee Keat – then considered a potential future prime minister – was a competitive contest between the PAP and its main political rival, the Workers’ Party, in 2020. The PAP secured 53.39 per cent of the vote against one of the stronger opposition teams. A new GRC, Pasir Ris-Changi, has been carved out of the East Coast and the former Pasir Ris-Punggol GRCs. East Coast has also been redrawn to take in some estates that were formerly in Marine Parade. For the divisions held by the opposition, there were no changes to Hougang and Sengkang, where the Workers’ Party secured its second multi-seat constituency for the first time in the last election. However, the boundaries in Aljunied have been redrawn for the first time since 2011, when the Workers’ Party first won the constituency, resulting in some districts being transferred to Tampines. The PAP has dominated the polls since Singapore’s independence in 1965. It has never slipped under 60 per cent of the vote share and in the last election in 2020 garnered 61.23 per cent, despite losing a record 10 seats to the opposition. Yet analysts and the PAP itself have acknowledged there is greater desire for opposition voices in parliament, which could sway coming votes in favour of the opposition. The next step towards the polls involves Wong asking President Tharman, himself a former cabinet minister, to dissolve parliament to trigger the start of a general election. The legal deadline for the polls to be held is November 23. In previous elections, the timing between the release of the EBRC report and the dissolution of parliament has ranged from one day to more than three months. Under the law, the election must be held within three months from the date parliament is dissolved. In 2001, parliament was dissolved in October, a day after the report was released. In the last election in 2020, held amid the pandemic, the EBRC – a panel tasked to recommend the number and boundaries of the country’s single- and multi-seat constituencies – sent its report to the prime minister on March 11 that year. The report was released on March 13, and the general election was held on July 10. Bucking the trend of the past three elections, the committee was tasked by Wong on January 22 to keep the average size of multi-seat constituencies and the proportion of members of parliament elected from single-member constituencies “about the same as that in the previous election”. In the past three elections in 2011, 2015 and 2020, the committee was asked to reduce the size of multi-seat constituencies and have more than or at least a specified number of single seats. In the previous pandemic-era election, the average number of MPs in each group representation constituency, or GRC, was 4.65, while single-member constituencies accounted for 15 per cent of the total number of MPs. In Singapore, the multi-seat wards or GRCs must have at least one ethnic minority candidate. Similar to the last election in 2020, there will no longer be group representation constituencies with up to six representatives; five is now the maximum number. The change helped quell complaints from Singaporeans that the GRC system was not truly democratic for allowing some more voting power than others. Opposition parties issued statements on Tuesday commenting on the changes outlined in the EBRC report. The Workers’ Party said it noted “significant changes to areas where WP has been working consistently for the last few years”, adding that it would share more information on the constituencies it was likely to contest and potential candidates in due course. A spokeswoman for the Progress Singapore Party said it was “heartened that the EBRC has somewhat disclosed more of the reasoning behind its decisions, contrary to its previous report in 2020”. “However, PSP’s view is that much of the EBRC’s decision-making remains unexplained, and the EBRC could have accounted for population shifts without making drastic changes to existing major electoral boundaries,” said the spokeswoman, adding that the party would announce where it would contest in due course. The Singapore Democratic Party said in a statement that it was “disappointed with the disappearance of Yuhua and Bukit Batok SMCs”. The process of redrawing electoral boundaries “lacks transparency”, the party’s spokeswoman said, noting that this was something the party had to “contend with this for the last few decades”. She added that the party would study the changes carefully and consolidate its plans. Political observers who spoke to This Week in Asia say they will be watching how the battle in key newly formed and restructured constituencies unfolds, particularly in areas where ministerial heavyweights have stepped down and opposition parties gained traction. Nydia Ngiow, managing director at BowerAsiaGroup, said changes in areas where the ruling party had performed well in the previous election could provide an opportunity to introduce new faces. “Strategically, this allows them to spread their strong support bases across multiple districts, and help prevent the opposition from making inroads,” she said. Ngiow noted that opposition-led constituencies remained largely unchanged, which could be intended to maintain consistency in electoral boundaries. Echoing her remarks, independent political observer Felix Tan said Aljunied was only slightly altered, which might make it easier for the Workers’ Party to streamline its activities there. “The message that the EBRC is probably trying to get at is that it’s fair game to all. They are treating all constituencies as equally as possible, and they’re not playing favourites.” Teo Kay Key, a research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, noted that historically, there had been no major changes to opposition-held constituencies. The changes to Aljunied were to “regularise electoral boundaries along key geographical features, as explained by the EBRC”, she said. During a parliamentary sitting last year, opposition politicians accused the ruling party of gerrymandering and argued that the PAP had gained a political advantage from how electoral boundaries had been changed. The government refuted these arguments, with Minister-in-Charge of the Public Service Chan Chun Sing stressing that the EBRC worked to serve the interests of “Singapore and Singaporeans first and foremost”. Eugene Tan, a political observer, pointed out that the EBRC had gone into greater detail in explaining the reasons behind the changes. While opposition parties were expected to “cry foul”, Tan said this was unlikely to sway voters. Adjustments in the western part of Singapore could lead to personnel changes in the constituencies for these areas, Teo said. “Given that we have seen [opposition] parties like the Progress Singapore Party and Singapore Democratic Party among others contesting in constituencies that are now no longer around or absorbed into other constituencies, we might see quite a lot of manoeuvring among the opposition parties that have already been walking the ground there,” she said. Felix Tan said he expected the newly formed West Coast-Jurong West constituency to be hotly contested since cabinet ministers who formerly anchored both Jurong and West Coast, Tharman and Iswaran, respectively, had vacated their seats. “It’s going to be quite a challenge because there’s no incumbent, so to speak, depending on who the PAP is going to put in place to contest that newly created GRC,” he said.

Singapore’s election battle lines set as body increases seats, redraws hot wards

The city state’s closely contested wards in the last election have been regrouped