SINGAPORE, July 19 — Minority groups in Singapore will be well represented in the upcoming 14th Parliament following the general election held on July 10.
Twenty-seven MPs from these groups will occupy as many parliamentary seats or 29 per cent of the total 93 seats, slightly higher than their 26 per cent composition of the population in the republic.
The main minority groups in Singapore are the Malays, Indians, Eurasians and others. The Chinese make up the majority.
Twelve of the 14 Malay candidates fielded by the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has been in power since independence in 1965, breezed through the intense general election, along with all their 11 comrades from the other minority groups.
The other four reps are from the Workers’ Party, among them party secretary-general Pritam Singh as well as a fresh face and the youngest MP, Raeesah Begum Farid Khan, 26.
Murali Pillai of the PAP is the only representative from an SMC (single-member constituency). He won the Bukit Batok seat, defeating Dr Chee Soon Juan, secretary-general of the Singapore Democratic Party.
The other minority MPs come from the 17 GRC (group representation constituency) seats.
Singapore introduced the GRC system in 1988 to ensure that the minority communities will always be represented in Parliament.
At least one of the candidates in the group representing a GRC must belong to a minority community.
The PAP had fielded six Malay new faces in the election battle along with six senior Malay politicians. All the new faces got elected.
The most senior, Masagos Zulkifli Masagos Mohamad, who was the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources in the last government, led his group to victory in the Tampines GRC, securing 66.41 per cent of the votes over the National Solidarity Party.
Former Senior Minister of State in both the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr Mohd Maliki Osman, secured 53.41 per cent of the votes to win the East Coast GRC, one of the hotly contested GRCs in the general election.
He was in the team led by PAP first assistant secretary-general Heng Swee Keat, who is tipped to be the next prime minister after Lee Hsien Loong steps down.
In the East Coast GRC, the PAP team faced the Workers’ Party team which had as a member Nicole Seah, who is considered the darling of the opposition.
Among the four other senior Malay candidates who sailed through is Zaqy Mohamad, who contested at Marsiling-Yew Tee GRC, a seat contested by current Singapore President Halimah Yacob in the 2015 general election.
Two of the senior candidates didn’t make it, namely Amrin Amin, former Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Home Affairs, and Health, who was fielded in the new Sengkang GRC; and Shamsul Kamar Mohamed Razali in the Aljunied GRC.
It was Shamsul Kamar’s second attempt with a PAP team to recapture the Aljunied GRC, which went to the opposition in the 2011 general election.
The youngest among the six junior candidates, Nadia Ahmad Samdin, 30, was in Hsien Loong’s team which defended the Ang Mo Kio GRC, one of the two GRCs which secured over 70 per cent of the votes.
The other GRC was Jurong, which garnered 74.62 per cent of the votes. The PAP five-member team fielded there was led by former Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Rahayu Mahzam was in that team. — Bernama
