SINGAPORE — The vast open field was awash in blue. More than 50,000 people, wearing the color of the opposition Workers’ Party, cheered wildly as speaker after speaker called on Singaporeans to vote for change. Whistles, drums and bugle calls stirred the crowd.
“This is the biggest I’ve ever seen,” Michael Goh, who at 71 is older than independent Singapore itself, said as he waded into the rally last week. “You go anywhere, it’s not as big as this.”
For an election in which one party always wins, there has been a lot of excitement on the streets of Singapore ahead of the parliamentary vote on Friday. The vote will be the first since the death of modern Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, in March, and the first in which all 89 seats are being contested. It also comes during the tropical island state’s 50th anniversary of independence.
Perhaps most important, it is the first general election since 2011, when voters awarded their government with something it had never seen during its five unchallenged decades in power: a barely passing grade. There were signs of discontent, especially among the young and the poor, over the lack of jobs and affordable housing, the rising cost of living and competition from foreign workers.
Chastised by winning barely 60 percent of the vote, its worst showing ever, the governing People’s Action Party, or P.A.P., embarked on a period of soul-searching.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the son of Singapore’s founder, publicly apologized for some of his government’s previous policies, and has spent the past four years trying to make amends.
His government has, among other things, slightly curbed the influx of skilled foreign talent that was perceived to have been taking jobs from Singaporeans, rolled out subsidized health care programs for all Singaporeans and other welfare programs to help the working class deal with high living costs, and tried to make it easier for citizens to buy government-subsidized housing.
To help pay for the new programs, the government announced a tax increase in February on the top 5 percent of earners, a radical step in a nation that has low taxes embedded in its DNA.
The question voters will answer on Friday, then, is whether these steps have been enough.
There is little doubt that the governing party will win — even in 2011, it won 81 of the 87 contested seats, thanks to a British-style first-past-the-post formula — but by how much remains to be seen.
“We say that 2011 was a watershed election, but whether it is or not, this time will tell,” said Chua Beng Huat, a political analyst and head of the sociology department at the National University of Singapore.
“If the P.A.P. ups its percentage” of the popular vote, he said, “we will have to rewrite the watershed.”
Analysts say the party’s main opposition, the populist Workers’ Party, stands a good chance of retaining the six seats it won in 2011, and possibly adding a few more, giving the country a viable opposition for the first time.
The Workers’ Party positions itself as the only check on the governing party, which Low Thia Khiang, the head of the Workers’ Party, said otherwise ruled by its “whims and fancies.” “We must remind the P.A.P. that there is a distinction between what is national interest and what is the P.A.P.’s party interest,” Mr. Low said at a campaign rally last Thursday.
For the Workers’ Party, that means more curbs on immigration, the introduction of a minimum wage and more spending on education.
Mr. Lee and his fellow P.A.P. candidates, meanwhile, are running on the party’s 50-year record and invoking the name of his charismatic father, who, through his leadership and sheer force of will, turned this once-impoverished former British colonial outpost into a prosperous global financial center within a single generation.
“Let us make the next 50 years better than the past 50,” the prime minister said on a prerecorded television pitch.
Mr. Lee called the elections just weeks after the country celebrated its 50th anniversary on Aug. 9, several months earlier than he had to, and scant months after the death of his father.
The government has promised big infrastructure plans, including adding a terminal at the Singapore Changi Airport, one of the largest transportation hubs in Southeast Asia, and expanding the public Singapore General Hospital, the country’s largest health care facility.
Not leaving anything to chance, the government announced in August that it would lower public transit fares by up to 1.9 percent in the hopes, according to analysts, of completing a trifecta of appealing to voters’ sense of pride, nostalgia and sweet relief from living in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
The P.A.P.’s opening rally at a field hockey stadium on Sept. 2 attracted about 1,000 supporters, a tepid turnout compared with the Workers’ Party’s rally the same night. But analysts discount such comparisons as a barometer for the election, counting on the governing party’s strong silent majority to carry the day.
Many older Singaporeans, especially, are content with the Singapore compact, accepting what they see as benign one-party rule in exchange for little crime, good public education and hospitals, feats of urban planning like recycling sewage into drinking water, near-zero public corruption and streets nearly clean enough to eat from.
“If you know how to run a big aircraft, and tomorrow someone comes and tries to take it over, it’s not easy,” said Mohammed Salim, 58, a hotel housekeeper who, while not having a university degree himself, said he had two sons in medical school in the United States.
Young people have challenged the old ways, advocating more freedom of speech, gay rights and transparency in government, issues that do not fit into the current Singapore model.
“It’s kind of like a situation where all of us have to break out of our shell to realize that, hey, maybe this is not the way the government should treat us,” said Gabrielle Navarro, 18, who is studying education at Temasek Polytechnic University.
But while the election has energized voters, it is unlikely to tip the scales.
Victoria Tan, a real estate agent in her 30s, said that while “we need more voices in Parliament,” she did not want too many opposition candidates elected.
“Maybe one or two more,” she said. “I want a balance, but one where the P.A.P. remains in power.”
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