How Singapore Became The World's Most Successful Dictatorship

On the fifteenth of January this year, the prime minister of Singapore sat down and wrote a letter. The letter did not fire a minister, dissolve a party, or throw anyone in jail. It simply announced that a title was gone. The man who had held that title, Pritam Singh, leader of the Workers' Party, had just spent five years as the country's first ever Leader of the Opposition. Now, in Lawrence Wong's own words, having considered the matter carefully, he had decided that Singh's criminal convictions, taken together with parliament's considered view of his unsuitability, made it no longer tenable for him to continue in the post. Here is the reversal. You would assume a title that important, the formal leader of the opposition in a national parliament, sits somewhere in a constitution, protected the way a supreme court seat or a term limit is protected, so that no single man can hand it out or take it back on a whim. It does not. Search Singapore's constitution. Search its standing orders. The office of Leader of the Opposition appears in neither. It was invented in a ministerial statement, read out in parliament on the thirty-first of August, twenty twenty, by a minister named Indranee Rajah, after the sitting prime minister at the time had informally decided, a few weeks earlier, that Pritam Singh deserved the job. No amendment. No vote. No law. Just a statement. Which means the position Wong took away in January was never really an office. It was a courtesy. And a courtesy, unlike a right, can be withdrawn by the same kind of letter that granted it in the first place. That is the part that should make you sit up. This is not a story about a government cracking down on a dissident. It is a story about a government that never had to, because it built a system where the crackdown was never necessary. The thing that was actually destroyed in January was not one man's career. It was the illusion, five years in the making, that Singapore's opposition had finally been given a permanent seat at the table. Not a conspiracy. Not a purge. A gift, quietly reclaimed. To understand how a government hands out and takes back a national office like a favor, you have to go back to a week in July nineteen sixty-four, on a stretch of open ground in central Singapore called the Padang. A religious procession turned into a riot. Over the following weeks, twenty-three people were killed and hundreds injured, and it happened again that September, another thirteen dead. The immediate cause was a bitter political fight between Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party, which wanted a multiracial Malaysia with no race receiving special treatment, and the party that then ran the federation, which wanted the opposite, and used propaganda accusing the Chinese of plotting against Malays to help incite the violence. Within a year, Malaysia expelled Singapore from the federation altogether, and Lee Kuan Yew, on live television, wept.