Lee Kuan Yew’s Son Faces a Changing and Demanding Singapore

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Mr. Lee is widely expected to maintain much of the political model put in place by his father—clean and efficient government, business, friendly economic policies, and an emphasis on maintaining social order.

But the younger Mr. Lee has also been recalibrating some long-standing policies of his ruling People’s Action Party, part of efforts to shore up support ahead of a potentially bruising general election due by January 2017, his third poll as leader after seeing his ruling party’s vote share decline in two consecutive elections.

But in recent years, the rapid pace of development in Singapore has created a groundswell of discontent among locals, who lament widening income inequality, rising housing and transport costs, and an influx of foreign labor. The city-state’s Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, is 0.463 (zero is perfect equality), compared with an average of 0.31 for countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the latest available figures

The younger Mr. Lee has begun to tackle these issues, but officials and analysts have said these measures take time to bear fruit, and it isn’t clear if they would prove sufficient to arrest the partial erosion of support for the ruling party. It won around 60% of the popular vote in the 2011 election, although it won 81 of 87 seats in Parliament, now 80 after a by-election loss in 2013.

Ms. Lim, of the University of Michigan, said that in the next general election, she expects a dwindling majority of mostly older Singaporeans to vote in favor of the PAP’s past record, while she believes many younger Singaporeans will choose the opposition “because, unlike their parents and grandparents under Lee Kuan Yew, they don’t see their own futures getting a whole lot better.”




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