Sumantra Maitra
Ilove Singapore. It’s a favorite city of mine, and on those mornings when I am feeling too cosmopolitan, I can imagine myself living there again. I was there for a few weeks a decade back, and it is a paradise compared to most western cities. What’s not to like? It is clean, orderly, modern, and civilized: a perfect city-state. And in an era of resentment and social upheavals across the west, it is a bastion of old-school, conservative political stability.
As recently reported by my colleague Spencer Neale, Singapore saw “its first Singaporean parliamentary election since the election of Prime Minister Lawrence Wong in 2024, the People’s Action Party (PAP) won a decisive victory Saturday, capturing 87 seats in the city-state’s 97-seat Parliament.” PAP’s landslide victory gives Singapore’s ruling party a clear mandate heading into the future. Of the nearly 3 million people registered to vote on the island, more than 65 percent of voters selected PAP, giving the ruling party its 14th consecutive win for PAP since independence. Unusually consistent for our times.
It seems odd to start a column about a febrile mood in Britain and Europe with a paean to Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) and Singapore. But for those who are not afflicted with myopia, they are connected. There are a few types of slop available on social media. One particular genre consists of cherry-picked and unoriginal quotes from LKY, Singapore’s legendary founding father and Anglophile ruler who transformed a backwater port city-state to a modern nation. Singapore itself is an actually existing multiracial society, with three main groups: the Singaporean Chinese with around 75 percent of the population, the Malays with around 15 percent, followed by the Indians around 9 percent of the total. The rest are Europeans, other Asians, and Pacific Islanders. And yet there is no racial reaction, nor much crime, nor civil discontent.
But LKY can at most be considered a classical liberal—a fact that might chagrin the dissident right is that he was hugely admired by none other than Tony Blair. Blair visited Lee in Singapore, and the former prime minister has reportedly said that Lee is the smartest leader he ever met.
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