Singapore voters can't afford to ignore harsh new global realities

Singapore voters can't afford to ignore harsh new global realities

- Bhavan Jaipragas

From now until the general election—which, by most accounts, seems just weeks away—conversations around dinner tables, over hurried lunches in CBD hawker centres, and at kopitiams on weekend mornings will likely revolve around the hot-button issues people can see and feel.

It's not hard to guess what will be on the menu: Public housing—will HDB flats remain affordable? Cost of living—is the broad middle as well as those less well off getting enough help even as inflation tapers? And immigration—that perennial question of balancing the need to attract a diverse, high-quality foreign workforce while preserving and nurturing a strong Singaporean core.

That focus on tangible, day-to-day concerns is hardly surprising. It's almost conventional wisdom, whether in our relatively subdued electoral climate or in places with fiercer politics, that local and national issues dominate.

When politicians try to steer the debate towards foreign policy or geopolitics, many voters simply glaze over, preferring bread-and-butter topics they can sink their teeth into and feel viscerally about.

Yet these are no ordinary times, and a broader perspective cannot be shrugged off. One could argue that voters ought to be nudged—perhaps even nagged—into thinking about the global stakes.

On a daily basis, we see signs aplenty that the international order we have known since World War II—certainly the environment Singapore has thrived in since independence—is coming undone.

Look no further than the last 10 weeks of President Donald Trump's second stint in the White House, which amount to a self-induced vaporisation of American leadership. Add to that the ongoing US-China decoupling, likely to have far-reaching consequences for war and peace in our part of the world.