Analysis | Can Singapore’s opposition Workers’ Party ride out scandal of its lying lawmaker Raeesah Khan?

Saga surrounding Raeesah has not stopped with her resignation as an MP, but snowballed. Now it is threatening to drag down Workers’ Party leader Pritam Singh too

As a parliamentary committee probes the WP’s handling of the matter, some warn of an ‘existential crisis’. Others caution the PAP against ‘victor’s justice’

Reading Time:6 minutes

Singapore’s Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh. Photo: The Workers’ Party

Published: 7:00pm, 15 Dec 2021Updated: 7:09pm, 15 Dec 2021

A snowballing controversy involving a lawmaker who resigned after lying in parliament is threatening the Singaporean opposition leader, Pritam Singh, less than 18 months after his party made historic electoral gains with the backing of the city state’s younger generation.

The saga initially seemed to only involve Raeesah Khan – a darling among Gen Z and millennial voters – but an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into the case has dragged Singh and other high-ranking leaders of the Workers’ Party (WP) into the picture.

In a nine-hour testimony last Friday before the parliamentary Committee of Privileges, Singh repeatedly denied suggestions that he acted improperly by failing to take Raeesah to task even though he and two other top party leaders knew within days that her August 3 speech about the police mishandling a sexual assault case contained falsehoods.

Apart from scrutinising Raeesah’s breach of parliamentary rules, the committee – made up primarily of MPs from Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) – has also been probing the WP’s seemingly lackadaisical internal handling of the matter.

Edwin Tong, a legally-trained cabinet minister and member of the panel, had suggested to witnesses including Singh that the WP leadership might have initially sought to suppress Raeesah’s transgression as it would put them and the party in a negative light.

A consensus view among local political analysts interviewed by This Week in Asia was that it was almost certain that the scandal took the shine off the WP’s achievement last July in the country’s most contested elections since independence.