PAP’s fresh team: More old wine, no new bottles

by Lim Jialiang

It’s just embarrassing to talk about a “Fresh Team” when you still see the People’s Action Party (PAP) old guards underpinning most of the election.

It is almost jarring to see the keynote speeches delivered by men who are follically challenged, to say the least, with a rigour that resembles a book club gathering at an Old Folks’ Home.

Un-retiring insipid political has-beens — Lim Swee Say? Really?? — for rally speeches is a surefire way of signalling to the electorate that you’re ready for a change. Of adult diapers.

The PAP’s campaign strategy has remained stoically stuck in the 1990s, a time when social media didn’t exist and they enjoyed a monopoly over the airwaves. It’s the same “gotcha” tactics, the same fearmongering, the same gaslighting.

They have also moved former key appointment holders to highly competitive Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) at the eleventh hour, focusing heavily on municipal pork-barrel politics (“I will ask my good friend Prime Minister Lawrence Wong for some money”). Honestly, what is there left to build?

Another Punggol plan? And then you drop a website like the infamous East Coast Plan, only to vanish from the scene like former Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat? Let’s frontload some savings instead and put Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong out to pasture.

At the same time, they seem desperate to be “on trend” on TikTok — but trend messaging is completely out of place when you’re running a national election, not participating in a beauty contest. People want to hear about how you can make their lives better, not how “cool” it would be for you to represent them.

The only updated aspect of their campaign seems to be an electoral strategy that allegedly put Kamala Harris in the White House (spoiler: it didn’t, god).

What we are witnessing is a wildly disconnected campaign, one that tries to straddle being both young and trendy, and old and geriatric — and somehow manages to fail at both.

There is a heavy reliance on past glories, a dogged attempt to gloss over recent scandals, and a glaring lack of substantive detail on how to meet the challenges of the future.

Honestly, at this point, I’m happy to just let the PAP cook — because they seem to be preparing a shit sandwich for themselves.

This was first published on Lim Jialiang’s Facebook page and reproduced with permission.