I have heard this repeated a few times and in conjunction with the catchy term "contest of ideas".
There are 12 SMCs, 2 4-member GRCs, and 13 6-member of GRCs which means there are a total of 27 possible contests at each GE. There are 3 major opposition parties namely WP, SDP and NSP. SPP is practically gone and the rest are a gathering of the delusional and the detached. Of the 3 main ones, NSP is part-time, always had a big question mark and generally not competitve. That leaves WP and SDP.
First, let's talk about the PAP. It is not that PAP is "still making policy errors". It is that right now they are paying the price for policy errors they made 20 years ago, it is very hard to turn the ship around, and the solutions that they have are not likely to work well. In a sense they are reaping what they sow which is good news. The bad news that the rest of us are also reaping what they sow. So in the forseeable future they are politically vulnerable no matter how brilliant the current batch is now.
SDP and WP - it's pretty unfortunate. One has to think about the formidable obstacles to building up opposition parties. They need to have great grassroots organisation, they need to have great policies, and they need to iteratively see whether those policies can be implemented and whether they have the desired effect.
SDP has policy credentials, but the big weakness of that is that none of those ideas are testable. Half of their ideas are great and the other half are wishful thinking and without getting into government there is no way people will know which half. And they are a long long way from government. It is extremely difficult to communicate those ideas to the Singapore populace because very few people in Singapore are schooled in political thought. No matter how relevant these ideas are, no matter how rooted to reality political thought is, most Singaporeans will only see that they are ideas and reject them immediately. This is because we as a people have a very strong strain of anti- intellectualism.
And the breadth and scope of SDP's ideas is not very much compared to the current elite who have to deal with matters day to day.
WP has the grassroots movement, which can actually rival the PAP. Maybe one day they will attain the intellectual weight and heft of the early days of the PAP. But I don't see anybody who is a LKY style evil genius. Maybe there is one in WP right now but I don't think so. When I read "Men in White" there were accounts that LKY had a lot of people in his basement and they talked about politics all day long. I don't know if there's anything to compare that with today.
We may think about the PAP as braindead zombies today but during the early days they had a lot of brilliant, daring and unconventional ideas. Because those ideas have become our universe right now, we may not be aware of how against the grain some of them were.
It is tempting to think that one day a party will combine the strengths of the two. But we don't know how to get there. Maybe WP will beef up on its policy, since WP is still growing, and we are only 10 years into the post-JBJ era. Maybe WP will finally open its doors and take in the wandering intellectuals. Or maybe WP will always be suspicious of policy wonks and remain a populist movement who knows how to obtain political power, but having obtained it, does not have the slightest clue what to do with it. (please god no)
All the other political parties will look at WP and they'd be worried. Because in a lot of westminister style democracies there are usually 2 main parties, and if those two are going to be PAP and WP, it's a long slide to oblivion for them. Maybe this question is weighing on their minds. So it is not true that just because their position is under threat, they got to panic and do something crazy / stupid. But the threat is very very real. If you think that it is difficult being an opposition party in a landscape dominated by one party, being one in a landscape dominated by two parties is even worse.
So from the standpoint of the opposition cause, it's pretty good to have 4 or 5 opposition parties develop on different tracks and you have a big group of capable politicians who will eventually cross lines here and there and end up in one of the major parties. But for the leaders of the smaller parties, it is an absolute nightmare.
For SDP, they have an online presence. Their weakness is that there are fewer walkabouts. And they're shut out of the SCM. So the only time they can make a great big splash is an election campaign. An election campaign is basically free advertising space and they want to grab it no matter what. But if they're going to screw up this campaign, the damage will more than compensate for the gains.
For SDP, this BE would not be a real war, since they have no chance to win the seat. But it is a great war game. All the logistics, all the organisation will be put to the test.
And for any other party, this would be a time to get the feedback. For all of them, they will never get the seat. But it is never about the seat. And if it is about sacrificing WP, that is only a side effect. The real issue for them is the war game.
