Singapore is the third nation to be conducting elections amidst Covid 19 along with South Korea in April and Serbia in late June. With a total strength of 2.65 million voters, Singapore prepares for Social distancing, ensuring that people are masked and using gloves before they proceed to cast their vote.
With the morning session phasing out, voters were a bit agitated as they were expecting the whole process to be within a time frame of 5-10 minutes while it took at least an hour. The morning slot was 2 hours. The Election Department claims the delay is due to the extra precautionary steps taken keeping in view the current situation.
Singapore’s Political Plot
Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong, son of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding leader has been in office since 2004 and has been showing good political will all along, however, has indicated this as his last term. Singapore has been ruled by People’s Action Party (PAP) ever since Independence and is expected to retain power.
The basis on which the Singapore’s people will cast their votes would be on how the government has handled the pandemic and its threat on Economic recession. The poll results in Singapore usually go under a lot of scrutiny as even the mildest of shifts in PAP’s popularity leads to major policy changes. The opposition parties do not offer a tough competition to PAP and just recheck their validity in front of the dominance of the ruling party.
Corona Strike
During the unlock phase of Singapore, the cases have hiked up back in double digits excluding the migrant laborers living in dormitories where the numbers are surging ever since. With a mere population of 2.65 million, it becomes a manageable task for the government to hold elections in the middle of COVID 19 rather than delaying the process.
Singapore was praised for the lowest mortality rate in the early phases but fizzled out due to the increase of Corona’s torment in migrant laborers.
