On nomination day, when I saw no opposition party contesting in Marine Parade-Braddell Heights GRC, I immediately messaged a friend and said, “Why didn’t WP contest in Marine Parade! There is no minister there, it would have won!”
After things had settled, I thought back to try to understand what had happened. I was one of those people who felt betrayed, thinking, why did WP not run in Marine Parade? But I had no meat in the game, I don’t even live in Marine Parade, but I felt I had the right to feel indignant.
I was on the computer looking at live updates of the nomination, so I decided to make sense of why WP did not run in Marine Parade, and I looked at past election data. Marine Parade was always the most difficult constituency for the WP to garner votes in. So, it started to make sense.
But what many people forget was that, it wasn’t only WP that was missing from Marine Parade (or other opposition parties). For the elections, the PAP generally sends a minister to helm each GRC (except 3 in this election; there’s not enough ministers to go around, and the PAP was not about to waste a minister in Aljunied and Sengkang GRC, after it lost its minister at Sengkang GRC in the last election.)
At 10am at the nomination centre, Gan Kim Yong, the minister helming the Marine Parade-Braddell Heights GRC, had also not yet turned up. Tan See Leng was also not yet there. The PAP had already announced that both of them would stand in the respective GRCS.
But there were also some GRCS where the PAP had not yet announced their candidates—East Coast GRC, Punggol and Tanjong Pagar GRCS.
The thing is, hindsight is always 20/20. The most analytical people could have guessed why the PAP had not shown its cards before nomination day for these GRCs. I did not, it took some time for my entitled indignant self to understand. It is possible that the PAP was likely waiting to see which constituencies the WP would contest in, before it decided how it should deploy.
And this is why The Worker’s Party and Pritam Singh made the decision not to reveal their slate until nomination itself—they knew what was at stake.
In Singapore, the nomination of candidates for election lasts only for an hour. It makes it difficult for the opposition parties to decide last minute to send a candidate to another constituency to run, unless you can fly from one end of Singapore to another. But equally, it can thus be challenging for the PAP to move its candidates to different constituencies. So, others are trapped, but you are trapped too.
And so, the WP and Pritam had to keep their cards very close to their chests. Now, other than the Aljunied and Sengkang GRCS, the WP also ran in 2 other GRCS in the last election—East Coast and Marine Parade GRCS, and it nearly won in East Coast.
So, in this GE2025 election, both East Coast and Marine Parade GRCs have been broken up, so it’s now more difficult for the WP to contest them. But, the Pasir Ris–Punggol GRC from GE2020 was also broken up, so that the new Pasir Ris-Changi GRC can absorb part of the former East Coast GRC. This also created the new Punggol GRC.
So, the question is, would the WP take the bait and continue to contest in the now Marine Parade-Braddell Heights GRC, or will it take the other bait and try to contest in the Punggol GRC? The new Marine Parade-Braddell Heights GRC includes the former MacPherson SMC where PAP won 71.74% of the votes in GE2020.
The new Punggol GRC includes the former Punggol West SMC, where the PAP won 60.98% of the votes. So it made sense for the WP to focus its resources on the new expanded GRC in Punggol. If the boundaries had not changed and there wasn’t a new Punggol GRC, the WP may have continued to run in the Marine Parade-Braddell Heights GRC.
However, the WP has limited resources, and if it ran for more than one-third of the election seats, we know how it went the last time, when fear was used to dissuade people from voting for the WP.
Before nomination day, the PAP had preemptively released its slate for the Marine Parade-Braddell Heights GRC. But it stayed silent on the East Coast and Punggol GRCS. You know, that’s the force of the WP, and it even threatens the ruling party. Or if you look at it the other way, the ruling party feels that it has been so weakened that it feels threatened.
So, all eyes were now on nomination day. For the PAP, it seems that the more senior the minister, the more he or she is relied on to hold onto a GRC. After Lee Hsien Loong, Shanmugam is the only other person to have entered parliament before 2000, and he singlehandedly took in 4 new MPs in the Nee Soon GRC.
There are three ministers who entered parliament in 2001. One of them is Indranee, who has been moved to the Pasir Ris-Changi GRC, to try to secure it after Teo Chee Hean left. This leaves Gan Kim Yong and Vivian.
In GE2020, the Pasir Ris-Punggol GRC was contested by SDA, but now that Punggol has been separated into its own GRC, who will take on the GRC? (The SDA has moved to contest in the Pasir Ris-Changi GRC.) So, should the PAP protect the East Coast or the Punggol GRC? Their bet could have been that the WP will try to hold on to the East Coast GRC, and the WP taking on Punggol GRC may have caught the PAP by surprise.
On nomination day, the PAP then made the sudden switch to move Gan Kim Yong—one of the ministers who entered parliament the earliest—to safeguard Punggol. Lawrence Wong said as well—The Straits Times reported Lawrence Wong as saying that Gan Kim Yong was deployed to Punggol GRC as the PAP needed a “senior office-holder of similar stature” to take over from Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean.
Since the Marine Parade is now uncontested, it looks like Tan See Leng was shifted to replace Gan Kim Yong in Chua Chu Kang. Half an hour into the nomination, Gan Kim Yong rushed to the nomination centre in a white BMW, and Tan See Leng via a motorcade—a motorcade, mind you!
On hindsight, and again hindsight is 20/20, but the WP really gave the PAP a run for its money. For all my misplaced indignation, I wouldn’t have been able to come up with such strategies. I could analyse it after it happened, but so can anyone.
But it’s not easy to build up a political party, and especially one that needs to sustain itself in a challenging political landscape, and yet be able to try to expand, in spite all the difficulties.
For people who have been with political parties before, you know how much work is required. And I’ve been with parties where even in the midst of elections, the party’s top leaders have no planning, no strategy, and were just sitting around and waiting for the election to be over.
So, like many Singaporeans, I only trust the 3 big opposition parties because they have proven themselves, they do the work, walk the ground, and come out with policies.
In their speeches, you keep hearing WP candidates talk about the need for resilience, because you need a lot of stamina to gain credibility to run.
One reason why the WP insists that its candidates should have joined them in walkabouts and Meet-the-People Sessions is because this is a way you can seive out how committed someone is, and whether they have the stamina to go to parliament, be humiliated in front of the whole nation by their opponents, and then spend their nights for the Meet-the-People Sessions, and their weekends on walkabouts.
I don’t think most of us have such stamina, and most of us wouldn’t intimately know how the change in electoral boundaries completely messes up your strategy, and that just a few weeks before election, you have to quickly rethink your strategy, and change your plans.
Sometimes, the years of walking on the ground may end up broken when boundaries completely shift.
Meanwhile, your opponent is ready with various scenarios of how you may redeploy your candidates for the redrawn electoral boundaries, and then prepare various methods to smear you in the media—again, you need to have been in the direct line of their public attacks to understand how they strategise their attacks against you.
And unwittingly, for the many of us indignant selves who were angry over the WP not contesting in Marine Parade-Braddell Heights GRC, and who join in the chorus to lament how we are unhappy, angry, upset or what validation we needed, this is exactly the trap that has been set for us, for us to voluntarily smear the WP and weaken the opposition’s position.
But it’s a war the WP is fighting, and this is why they do not discuss with other parties their plans. There are many mole parties or candidates, and I’m sure the WP have had their share of experience with them, and have had to remove them from the party, who then go on to other smaller parties.
But the WP has to focus and carry on. They have their strategy, and they stick to it—that’s how they survived. And it’s because they survived, we have a chance to complain about them.
We talk about opposition unity, etc, or some grand idea. But at the end of the day, it is the WP’s strategy that actually gives us a chance to have different voices in parliament. It’s not our indignation. It’s also useful to stay calm, reflect on what happened, and then focus on the larger game, not miss the forest for the trees.
The post A Game of Boundaries: Why WP didn’t contest in Marine Parade appeared first on The Online Citizen.
