Singapore election: race, foreign meddling hot topics with hot seats too close to call

Singapore’s nine-day election campaign reached its halfway mark on Monday. Workers’ Party vice-chair Faisal Manap made a surprise move leaving the party’s stronghold of Aljunied to Tampines, where he is facing the People’s Action Party team led by Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs Masagos Zulkifli in a constituency that has the highest proportion of the Malay minority community in Singapore, at nearly 25 per cent. “People are portraying this as Faisal versus Masagos and comparing their records. This is not unfair, of course, since both are the leaders of their teams,” wrote Walid Jumblatt Abdullah, a political scientist from NTU, in a social media post on Friday.  But while raising parliamentary records remained “fair game”, he wrote that rhetoric suggesting how “good Muslims” should vote “can only be unequivocally bad for public discourse”.

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