“What the hell” must have been last night’s theme.
The sample count at the table where I was a counting agent was pretty miserable. An ulcer on my tongue made it painful to drink water or speak properly. My usually comfortable shoes gave me blisters on the walk home. The coffeeshop I’d eaten at before my volunteer duty had been infested with flying ants that dive-bombed our dinners and crawled into our clothes; when I got home at the end of the night, I pulled two bugs out of, of all places, my bra. Then the official results started rolling in.
What the hell.
Over the past 10 days, many of us expressed a desire for change and democracy. It was so easy, so appealing to get caught up in the online fervour and within our social circles, and to hope that this desire would manifest in parliamentary seats. But last night we were given a harsh reminder that many Singaporeans don’t think the same way (or, at the very least, don’t feel as strongly about it).
For those of us old enough to have followed that election a decade ago, last night had big GE2015 vibes, when the PAP marked a 10% gain in vote share from GE2011. After sleeping on it, though, I’m in a better state of mind to notice that the swing hasn’t been as dramatic this time—despite pulling out all the stops to ensure circumstances were in their favour, the PAP vote share climbed by only about 4%.
The headliners
The Workers’ Party held on to their parliamentary seats in Aljunied GRC, Sengkang GRC and Hougang SMC, and got rather close in Jalan Kayu SMC and Tampines GRC—Andre Low and one member of the Tampines team will likely become Non-Constituency Members of Parliament. All things considered, WP has done pretty well and we’re at status quo with 10 elected opposition seats.
But for other parties, last night was heartbreaking. Five years of slog as NCMPs didn’t pay off for Leong Mun Wai and Hazel Poa; their team received 39.99% of the vote in West Coast-Jurong West GRC, a far cry from the 48.32% showing they had in West Coast GRC in 2020. The party cancelled a scheduled press conference and sent out this message from Leong instead:
PSP thanks the voters who have supported us. We are shocked by the results. We will study seriously and humbly into our failure, and reconsider how we can gain further trust from Singaporeans. We may need to review our strategy and regroup ourselves to fight another day.
For the Singapore Democratic Party, a big, big let-down. Paul Tambyah, who’d just been 2,509 votes away from the line in GE2020, saw his percentage drop to 38.59% in Bukit Panjang SMC. The Marsiling-Yew Tee GRC team managed to clinch just 26.54%, the Sembawang GRC team 29.93%. Dr Chee Soon Juan performed the best with 46.81% in Sembawang West SMC—a battleground he only entered this year after the erasure of Bukit Batok SMC—but narrowly missed out on an NCMP seat.
WHY?!
In the face of such a depressing result, it’s only natural that many of us start looking for explanations—or for someone, something, to blame.
This is a frustrating exercise for which calm and caution is required. We don’t have a lot of data to substantiate our theories or arrive at firm conclusions. In the wake of the sample count I saw angry statements about new citizens pop up across social media. There’s a widespread assumption that the PAP enthusiastically adds new citizens to the mix every election cycle because they’ll all vote lightning in gratitude. But we don’t have data to tell us how new citizens actually vote—we can’t imagine them to be a monolithic single-issue bloc—and, in any case, there simply aren’t enough new citizens to explain this vote share. Perpetuating this narrative only stokes more animosity and xenophobia against new citizens.
Other explanations and hypotheses floating around similarly lack the backing of hard data. Was last night’s result because of Trump and his tariffs? Or was it because of gerrymandering? How many voters judge their candidates on their parliamentary performances, or are they easily swayed by covered walkways and $1 deals? Has the snap election on a long weekend—leading to a record low turnout—affected things? We sense that all these factors come into play in some way but don’t have clarity on the exact impact of each.
What’s clear is that this was never a fair game. The results we saw last night—WP’s maintenance of their vote share despite an increase in areas of contestation, their preservation of their existing seats, Chee Soon Juan’s close margin in a new SMC—were achieved against all the odds stacked against the opposition. The new electoral boundaries were released only a month before the writ of election and the changes were especially drastic this time. The incumbent had a massive advantage: they have a lot more money and manpower, and the line between the People’s Association, a state-funded statutory board, and the PAP, a political party, basically doesn’t exist. I thought The Straits Times did a little better on social media this time, but the mainstream media in general (especially in print) is still a trash fire of pro-PAP bias. And Singapore’s GRC + First-Past-The-Post system continues to lead to terrible vote–seat disproportionality where voters actually aren’t getting the Parliament that we want and deserve.
In Singapore, every opposition gain—even every opposition maintenance of the status quo—requires massive grit and effort. We should never forget that. But what’s discouraging about these election results is that the PAP might interpret this as a sign that there’s no political cost to their “negative politics” of gerrymandering, setting unfair rules, restricting media freedom, harassing activists and critics, enforcing rights-abusing laws like the Public Order Act or the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act and refusing to acknowledge Singaporeans’ right to freedom of information.
Silver linings
There’ve been terrible losses this election but I’m not sad about all of them. The People’s Power Party and People’s Alliance for Reform are losing their deposits in Ang Mo Kio GRC, Potong Pasir SMC, Radin Mas SMC and Tampines GRC. It’s a resounding rejection of these two parties, who’ve shown themselves to be racist, homophobic, xenophobic and generally ridiculous. This is what sets the disappointment of the GE2025 results apart from the devastation of Trump’s victory in the US and Nigel Farage’s triumph in England’s local elections. The result is bad and gives authoritarianism a boost, but it’s not far-right extremist fascism bad at this point—and we need to keep it that way.
I don’t expect them to, because Goh Meng Seng and Lim Tean are walking balloons puffed up by their own egos and hot air, but I hope PPP and PAR will take the hint and walk straight—STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT!—into political oblivion.
Stand up and put one foot ahead of the other
I was pretty crushed last night. I lay in bed, limbs aching from standing in a counting centre and days of tramping around rally grounds, and let myself feel despondent. All that hard work by candidates and parties and volunteers and journalists and civil society, all for this?
This morning, though, I woke up still feeling heavy but resolute. Four percentage points is hardly the “landslide” the mainstream media insists it is. These results don’t take away from everything we’ve done together, not just over the past 10 days but also over the past five years and beyond. I still stand by what I’ve said: we, the citizens, are not the same. The “we” I’m talking about might not be the majority of the country, but social and political change rarely requires every citizen. Research has shown that active participation of about 3.5% of the population in civil resistance is enough to bring about significant political change. Hope is far from lost.
This isn’t the worst Singapore has seen. That there are nail-biting close fights—requiring the PAP to send their un-fresh heavyweights into Tampines and Punggol to shore up their campaigns—already indicates a shift in Singapore’s political scene from the days when the PAP could easily waltz into government. The PAP appears to have learnt (a little bit, anyway) that threats of putting opposition wards at the back of the upgrading queue and launching big smear campaigns against opponents don’t really fly with the electorate anymore. This shift has been hard won; opposition parties and Singaporeans wrested it from the PAP and forced this evolution. If we could do this, then there’s no reason to stop.
Based on these results, the PAP has little motivation to change the rules of the game, the way they handle dissent or infantilise Singaporeans. But it doesn’t mean we have to give them a “free pass” and let them have an easy time over the next term. If they’re going to continue undermining democratic progress, suppressing civil and political rights and refusing to listen or be fully accountable to the people, then we should give the PAP a very, very hard time even as we build up alternatives and strengthen our communities.
A lot of us feel lousy about the results. That’s absolutely valid. Sit with that disappointment, that grief, that anger, that rage. Then take those emotions and turn them into fuel. Volunteer with an opposition party or even join them, if their politics really resonate with you. Engage in civil society activism by joining an existing group or starting your own. Build solidarity so that when state oppression or harassment comes, we can stand together and resist. Talk to your family and friends and try to get them involved. If everyone changes the political norms around them even just a little bit, we’ll all be surprised by what we can collectively achieve.
The election is over. Our work starts now.
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