Quora Answer: Will a Coalition Government of Opposition Parties Work for Singapore

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Will a coalition government among the opposition parties work for Singapore?”

Outside of government, the Opposition parties already bicker, and are unable to come together as a viable coalition to challenge the PAP.  Many smaller parties are successors of older parties created when members quit and started their own little political fiefdoms.  For example, the Reform was started by Joshua Benjamin Jeyaratnam, after he left the Workers’ Party, and the Singapore People’s Party began as a faction of the Singapore Democratic Party.  They cannot get along as it is.

Do we imagine that they would all magically become friends in the unlikely event that we have a hung parliament, and they need to cobble together a majority?  The Workers’ Party will never work with Chee Soon Juan.  The Reform Party will never work with the Workers’ Party.  Progress Singapore Party would more likely form a coalition with the PAP than work with most of the other Opposition parties.  Desmond Lim Bak Chuan and Ravi Philemon are not likely to work with the National Solidarity Party.

If we ever came to that, such a coalition would be a disaster for Singapore.  Except for a handful of credible candidates, the rest of the Opposition candidates lack credibility, lack business acumen, lack intelligence even.  We have only to see in Malaysia, how badly Pakatan Harapan threw away all that political capital because people like Lim Guan Eng, and Mohamad bin Sabu were obviously out of their depth.  A Singapore Opposition coalition would fragment faster than ice thrown from orbit.