In the uninterrupted six decades that the People’s Action Party (PAP) has ruled Singapore, leadership succession has been carefully choreographed well in advance and executed. That plan has now gone awry, with prime minister-in-waiting Heng Swee Keat announcing that he was bowing out to make way for younger leaders. He wasn’t up to the job in the first place, says Michael Barr, who teaches international relations at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. That someone like him was appointed shows the ‘serious systemic problem that Singapore faces in its standard of governance’, Prof. Barr told StratNews Global. Since the PAP rule in 1959, Singapore has had just three prime ministers—Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Chok Tong, and Lee Kuan Yew’s son Lee Hsien Loong (still on the job). While it was good for Singaporeans to have long-term political stability in the early decades, the longer it has gone on, the less well it has served them, feels Prof. Barr. Listen in for more.
Podcast Producer: Manas R. Tarai
