In Singapore, the Party in Power Offers New Faces

 

SINGAPORE — After a painstaking search involving hundreds of man-hours and very likely thousands of cups of tea, Singapore’s overpowering political machine, the People’s Action Party, has presented to the public its carefully vetted crop of next-generation candidates for an election it is virtually certain to dominate again.

The party, which has never been out of power since Singapore became a self-governing state in 1959, now holds 82 of the 84 elected seats in Parliament and is expected to come close to that number again in the next election. It has introduced 24 new candidates over the past month, in a regular generational cycle that party leaders say is more significant than usual this year because the new slate probably includes the next prime minister.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has not yet announced the date of the election, which must be held by February 2012. But the People’s Action Party, or P.A.P., introduced its election manifesto on Monday and is already on the campaign trail, as are several smaller parties.

While Singapore has a multiparty system, opposition parties are hindered by a lack of funds, by the reluctance of potential candidates to challenge the government, by a configuration of districts that favors the governing party and by the sheer organizational power of the P.A.P. All 84 elected seats are being contested; the Constitution provides for the appointment of a small number of nonelected members.

But given the dominance of the P.A.P., the party’s search process — involving background checks, psychological tests and rounds of what are known as “tea session” get-togethers — has become, for all practical purposes, the system by which Singapore chooses its government and leaders.

“The people we’re bringing in now are not ready to be prime minister today,” Mr. Lee said this month. “But somebody amongst them or amongst the next batch — but I hope amongst the earlier ones — one day I hope will be prime minister.”

There are issues in this campaign — rising prices and rising immigration chief among them — but the elections are not so much about policy as about the people who will make the policies, mostly behind closed doors.

All of this is in line with the P.A.P.’s style of single-party governance: long-term decisions made by an inner circle, without the distractions of a substantial opposition or the time pressures of electoral deadlines. Public debate can make issues “harder to solve,” the prime minister said this month.

“I would say that our concerns about adversarial politics is why we feel that it’s good for us to have the P.A.P. as a broad-based party representing many views and having some of these trade-offs and tensions resolved within the party rather than between parties,” he said.

Asked whether there were not 20 people equally qualified to run against the P.A.P., Matthias Yao, who is retiring as a member of Parliament after four terms in office, said, “If we did have 40 good people, why not put them in one team, not two teams, when the other half by definition must oppose what the first team is doing?”

In the five years since the last election, the governing party has had “tea sessions” with more than 260 prospects, sometimes traveling abroad if these individuals had overseas jobs, Education Minister Ng Eng Heng, a senior party member, said in a recent forum.

“We didn’t always tell them why we were talking to them,” he said. “There were some tea participants whom we saw through changes in jobs. Some got married, pregnant, delivered. We saw them in various forms, antepartum and postpartum.”

As part of the process, Mr. Ng said, “We shortlisted some for intense, eight-hour psychological profiling.” Each prospect attended at least five tea sessions with members of a six-person interview panel, and the fittest of them were sent to a final session with the prime minister, said a member of the panel, K. Shanmugam.