Election Day was a well-rehearsed ballet. Polling officers were impeccably polite and efficient, a quiet testament to the calibre of men and women in our civil service. There were no real queues – thanks, in part, to new polling centres conveniently nestled nearer to the heartlands.
By midnight, the scoreboard glowed a neat 65.57% for the People’s Action Party.
And yet, when the jubilation died down and dawn broke the next morning, there was a strange hollowness to it all. It wasn’t despair. It wasn’t relief. It was something quieter, something harder to name.
The news cycle moved briskly along, as it always does—from the latest faux pas on the rally stage, to leaked Telegram messages, to a brisk round of number-crunching to explain why the PAP had won big and what it all meant.
And then came the counter-arguments: the opposition called it a landslide that wasn’t really a landslide. (On that point, I tend to agree. These weren’t sweeping victories. They were essentially walkovers masquerading as a strong mandate. The PAP juggernaut’s triumph over the “mosquito parties” feels like a hollow victory.)
Is a mandate really a mandate if it was won on Hobson’s choice?
A Deeper Unsettling
But at the end of it all, there was a mood that unsettled me more than anything else—an uninspiring boredom. As if the nation had filed in to watch a symphony played with machine-like perfection, each note executed flawlessly, and yet, the entire performance was delivered in the key of a lukewarm middle C. Everything was technically correct. But nothing—absolutely nothing—stirred the soul.
Yes, there was a lot of quibbling over the 2% rise in GST, but something was missing. And then it dawned on me: The sad reality is that Singapore no longer votes for ideas and strongmen. We vote for managers. Our politics has become an arena for trifles and technocratic tussles, and we applaud every successful audit while wondering why the game feels so hollow.
Our politics works, but it doesn’t inspire.
From Revolution to Regional Management
The PAP began life as a crimson-hot independence movement. Even today, watching early rally speeches sends shivers down the spine. It was a time of dreams, hope, grit and knuckle-dusting. But now, 60 years on in 2025, the PAP wraps this election season looking and sounding like a global consulting firm: data-driven, relentlessly competent, attractively beige.
Prime Minister Lawrence Wong personifies the journey. He is steady, modest, spreadsheet-sure—everything a comfort-seeking, risk-averse electorate treasures. But ask even the loyalists what grand story animates his government and the room will likely fall silent.
Elections as Performance Reviews
Listen again to the campaign language.
The PAP promised “securing a brighter future,” an exhortation so anodyne it could headline an insurance brochure. The Workers’ Party countered with efficiency of a different flavour—independent fiscal offices, smart unemployment insurance. Worthy proposals, all painstakingly costed, yet no one confessed a dream big enough to lift the heart.
Nevertheless, we rewarded them anyway.
We have grown expert at assessing project managers. In our shorthand, a “failed politician” is simply someone who cannot run a town council. The GST rate, the BTO queue, the performance of lifts—these are not trivial matters; they are the municipal arteries of daily life.
But when politics never dares to wander beyond the mundane mill and churn of bread and butter politics, it leaves the soul starving for protein.
The Mandate That Mandatory Voting Built
Official turnout hit 92.47 per cent, a democratic marvel until one remembers turnout is compulsory. Remove the legal prod and you confront hidden apathy: record absenteeism, almost 100,000 spoilt ballots, citizens who showed up in body, not spirit.
In such a setting the safest steward wins by default. The PAP did not need to intoxicate; only reassure. Opposition parties followed the cue. Manifestos converged on the language of incremental delivery because that is what the electorate habitually buys.
The paradox of our setup is that we have engineered elections so clean they leave no fingerprints of conviction.
Election Season Is Not Political Culture
Once every five years Singaporeans erupt in carnival energy—rally crowds waving flags beneath street-lamps, TikTok feeds ablaze with cut-up speeches. The ninth day ends, Cooling-Off descends, and public passion is patriarchally silenced. Father knows best.
After all was said and done, how many rally-goers joined a civic association on 4 May? How many convened neighbours to debate the threat of AI on our education system or the harms of smartphone usage on our youth, or ageing with dignity in a nation that is graying so fast that we might soon convince ourselves that killing our aged is the pragmatic compassionate thing to do?
Our system encourages us to surface briefly, perform a competence audit, then submerge again into managerial tranquillity.
Our Part in the Narrow Window
The Overton window is narrow because we have narrowed it.
When citizens ask only cost-benefit questions—How many BTO launches? Which party keeps lifts running?—parties reply in cost-benefit dialect. We complain of meagre oratory while reaching instinctively for the calculator.
We have outsourced transcendence to religion, meaning to lifestyle brands, and the future to civil servants.
If we want deeper politics, we must enlarge the questions we dare to ask: What kind of neighbour are we in a fracturing world? How do we honour both coder and cleaner in a meritocracy grown brittle? How does a knowledge-based economy thrive in a world where anyone can purchase all the world’s knowledge for just USD20 a month?
The moment we begin to hunger for answers that do not fit a quarterly report, parties will be forced to learn new tunes.
The Limits of Our Electoral Imagination
And because we insist on measurable deliverables, debate shrinks to whatever fits a KPI dashboard.
We spent a month sparring over whether the GST rise might be shaved by two percentage points, as though the nation’s destiny hinged on the diameter of that hair.
Necessary arithmetic—but where was the quarrel over the type of society we hope those taxes will underwrite? Where was the argument about meaning, belonging, the shared good life?
Missing, too, was an honest struggle with first principles—what prosperity means beyond GDP, or how a multilingual, multireligious island remains genuinely plural rather than politely partitioned.
And beyond the quest for an updated metanarrative, our politics failed to ask the question that our future is already demanding.
How long can we keep running the country on resilience as our daily fuel and reserves as our hedge? Is our economy truly diversified enough to weather a shift from globalisation to protectionism? Why did nobody—across the entire campaign—raise AI-catalysed job displacement as an imminent, existential threat?
Far from being fringe concerns, these questions we must wrestle with are central to the next twenty years of survival.
In another time, our founders once ransacked language for words equal to the dream of turning mudflats into a metropolis. But GE2025 ransacked spreadsheets for evidence that the metropolis remains impeccably serviced with nary a vision for painting the masterpiece of tomorrow.
But before I get ahead of myself, I suppose a more structural question is in order. Can a system designed to prevent political risk ever birth political imagination? Or must the next great Singaporean idea come from outside the system entirely?
Why a Post-Political Future Frightens Me
Competence without vision risks three failures.
First, complacency: great institutions rarely die from malice but from self-satisfaction; innovation clogs when feedback arrives only in decimals.
Second, brittleness: a polity trained to avoid big questions may confront them one day in panic, and swings born of panic tend to be violent.
Third, talent drift: idealists move to fields—art, activism, foreign cities—where imagination is still salaried, leaving politics to the risk managers.
Even the 2025 map offers subtle warnings to the incumbent: In Tampines and Jalan Kayu, charisma and community nearly unseated heavyweight ministers. Abstention spiked in Mountbatten and Tanjong Pagar, of all places. The Workers’ Party once again captured half the vote wherever it stood. A ceiling, perhaps, or a phosphorescent hint of appetite for alternatives as yet unarticulated.
Re-widening the Horizon
But before we go further, let me be clear. This is not a call for combative, strongman politics. We’ve seen what that breeds elsewhere. Singapore does not need to swing wildly in search of personality or the theatrics of ideological polarisation. It needs a communicated, brave politics of vision.
I say all this with deep gratitude for the privileges we enjoy today. We did not stumble into stability. It took foresight, rigour, and decades of stability to get here. We were led here by generations of steady hands, disciplined thinking, and a rare commitment to delivery. We inherited this beauty, but for the sake of the generations that are to come after us, we cannot be the weak men of history that rests on the laurels of the past.
The very stability that brought us here cannot take us the rest of the way.
Because what looms on the horizon—ageing populations, a shrinking native Singaporean core, social fragmentation, post-globalisation shocks, a reshuffling world order, AI job collapse—cannot be managed by minor tweaks.
These require vision. Direction. The kind of moral imagination we used to be known for.
I have no prescriptions—only suggestions.
Let’s experiment with citizens’ assemblies on things like climate or housing, so deliberation is not a nine-day carnival but an everyday muscle.
Let’s mandate open data on town councils and the People’s Association, so argument returns to ideas, not rumours. Let’s insist that media outlets, new and old, disclose who pays the bills, then watch how quickly cross-ideological debate becomes indispensable.
Above all, let us—citizens, journalists, candidates—risk the embarrassment of talking about the good life in unapologetically ethical terms. That language built a nation once; our grandchildren may need it more than we do.
From Clinic to Cathedral
GE 2025 was Singapore’s annual medical check-up: precise tests, swift results, courteous bedside manners.
But a check-up cannot answer the deeper, older question: What sort of life do we want once we leave the clinic?
Until our politics can speak that question with a poet’s nerve and a statesman’s weight, competence—no matter how gleaming—will remain a beautifully crafted cage.
We must find our way from sterile competence to soulful ambition.
