Inside the PAP's GE2025 playbook — and why rivals should take notes

Seeking to salve the sting of defeat is understandable, but opposition-leaning voices should closely study why the PAP's GE2025 strategy worked.

- Bhavan Jaipragas

Victory has a thousand fathers, as they say, while defeat is an orphan.

Yet for Singapore's ruling PAP, one of the world's most successful political parties, such is its reality that even when a strong win materialises, there is every chance it is dismissed as not that big a deal. Why praise the political equivalent of a serial championship-winning team for securing another trophy?

Hence the curious commentary among pockets of the political intelligentsia over the past week suggesting that the 65.57 per cent mandate Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and his party secured, while stemming further Workers' Party inroads, was somehow overhyped — merely to be expected, a "status quo result".

Commentators advancing this argument claim the vote share increase stemmed mainly from the weakness of most opposition parties bar the WP, rather than any genuine fillip for the PAP — let alone constituting a landslide.

But this reasoning rings peculiarly inconsistent: Wasn't the 2015 election, unanimously accepted as the last major PAP landslide, also contested against similarly weak political parties across the board, bar the WP?

Those high barometers of recent electoral success that such analysis typically venerates — including the regular high-margin victories of former PAP stalwart and current President Tharman Shanmugaratnam — were likewise secured against weak opponents. Are these, too, suddenly unimpressive?

This is all the more notable considering the PAP entered GE2025 carrying substantial baggage: widespread concerns about living costs and a troubled electoral term marked by unprecedented incidents — the first-ever imprisonment of a former Cabinet minister and the dual resignations of both the House Speaker and an MP following revelations of their extramarital affair.