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Opinion | Hong Kong politics post-national security law: why Singapore’s Barisan Sosialis could hold lessons for city’s opposition
- A walkout from the island nation’s parliament in 1966 has become an unlikely reference for Hong Kong’s pan-democrats of today
- Singapore’s opposition has never regained the ground it gave up decades ago – something to keep in mind as activists mull a collective boycott of the city’s new political system
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A chapter from Singapore’s history has become an unlikely reference for some in Hong Kong’s opposition camp.
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The object of their curiosity is the opposition walkout from Singapore’s Parliament in 1966, and the lessons it might hold for Hong Kong’s pan-democrats of today.
A Hong Kong opposition leader let on privately that he was reading Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs to glean lessons on how to avoid the kind of dominance Singapore’s first prime minister achieved. Another revealed he wanted to find out more about how the island nation’s current opposition was coping.
Is this what Hong Kong has come to? The city’s once defiant and rambunctious activists, who used to look scornfully at the Southeast Asian republic’s lack of civil liberties, now fear that Singapore’s past is Hong Kong’s future. Singaporeans’ constitutionally guaranteed capacity to change their government through the ballot box has become something Hongkongers can only fantasise about.
Hong Kong’s much-vaunted freedoms were on full show in 2019, in the protests against the now-withdrawn extradition bill. Riding on strong anti-establishment sentiment, the opposition secured control of all but one of the 18 district councils in the November 2019 elections. Through the district council seats – once the stronghold of the pro-Beijing camp – it expected to enlarge its presence on the election committee that chooses the city’s chief executive.
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