Presidential elections were scheduled to be held in Singapore on 13 September 2017. Following amendments to the Constitution of Singapore, which resulted in the elections being reserved for candidates from the Malay community.
Halimah Yacob who had served as Speaker of Parliament from 2013 to 2017 was elected in an uncontested election after she was the only candidate granted an eligibility certificate. She was sworn in as the eighth President of Singapore on 14 September 2017.
Background
The President is the head of state of Singapore. Following the Westminster system, the position is largely ceremonial, but enjoys several reserve powers including withholding presidential assent on supply bills and changing or revoking civil service appointments. The current system of holding elections for the Presidency began with the 1993 election, with the election of Ong Teng Cheong. Previously, the President was selected by Parliament.
There are strict requirements for prospective presidential election candidates, and whether a candidate meets the qualifications or not is decided by the Presidential Elections Committee (PEC), who are given the task of issuing a certificate of eligibility (COE) to prospective candidates. In short, candidates must satisfy either the public sector or private sector requirements. The public sector requirement has an automatic track where the candidate has held either a designated public office or chief executive position of a key statutory board or government company. The private sector requirement also has an automatic track where the candidate has held the chief executive position of a company with S$500 million shareholder equity and net profitability (revised in 2016 from S$100 million paid-up capital). Not withstanding the aforementioned, candidates could also be qualified on a deliberative track where their abilities and experiences have been assessed by the PEC to be equivalent to either of the public or private sector automatic track requirements.
The Presidency is, by the rules of the Constitution, required to be nonpartisan. However, Halimah had, until her presidential campaign, ties with the People's Action Party. She was a member of the party's Central Executive Committee, as well as the chair of the party's Seniors Group. She was also an elected PAP Member of Parliament and Speaker of Parliament prior to her resignation in 2017.
Following amendments to the Constitution of Singapore, the election was the first to be reserved for a particular racial group under a hiatus-triggered model. The 2017 election was reserved for candidates from the minority Malay community, who had not held the presidential office since 1970.
In his speech to Parliament on 27 January 2016, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that it was timely to review the eligibility criteria of the Elected Presidency. On 10 February 2016, a Constitutional Commission consisting of nine individuals and chaired by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon was formed. In its report released on 7 September 2016, the Commission recommended the following key changes:
- The election should be reserved for a racial group if it is not represented for five terms, or 30 years. If there are no eligible candidates from that group, the election would be opened to candidates of all races, and the "reserved election" would be deferred to the next Presidential election.
- The Council of Presidential Advisers (CPA) should be increased from six to eight members, with two alternate members. The President would have to consult the CPA on all monetary issues related to the financial reserves and all key public service appointments.
- A qualifying candidate from the private sector should be a senior executive managing a company with at least S$500 million in shareholders' equity. Previously, such a candidate had to be a chairman or CEO of a company with at least S$100 million in paid-up capital.
- For qualifying candidates from both the public and private sectors, the length of time that the candidate has held office should be doubled to six years.
- The public sector offices of Accountant-General and Auditor-General should be removed from automatic qualification.
- An applicant's entire qualifying tenure should fall within a 15-year period preceding Nomination Day.
The government announced in a White Paper published on 15 September 2016 that it has accepted some of the recommendations, including the first three changes above. The government raised the financial requirements for private sector candidates while keeping the requirements of public sector candidates constant, stating it is adopting a "cautious" approach given the other concurrent changes to other aspects of eligibility criteria. On 8 November 2016, PM Lee, under the advice from Attorney-General, announced that the 2017 Presidential Election will be reserved for candidates from the Malay community.
"We have taken the Attorney-General's advice. We will start counting from the first President who exercised the powers of the Elected President, in other words, Dr Wee Kim Wee. That means we are now in the fifth term of the Elected Presidency."
The rules for campaigning have also been modified. Rally sites will no longer be designated for the candidates. All candidates are required to apply for police permit on their own to hold a rally. Also, candidates are required to sign a statutory declaration to affirm that they understand the roles of a president. These rules are purportedly made to ensure that the candidates campaign in a "dignified" manner.
Constitutional challenges
On 5 May 2017, Tan Cheng Bock, a former Member of Parliament (MP) from the People's Action Party (PAP) who contested in the Singaporean presidential election of 2011, filed a constitutional challenge to determine whether it is correct to set the Presidential Election 2017 as a reserved election under the newly introduced amendments to the Elected Presidency. His challenge was dismissed by Justice Quentin Loh in High Court, explaining that "Article 164(1)(a) provides for Parliament to specify the first term of office of the President to be counted under Art 19B(1) ("First Term")." He then filed an appeal, heard by the Court of Appeal on 31 July 2017. On 23 August 2017, his appeal was unanimously dismissed by the court of five judges which ruled that the Parliament has full discretion to set the First Term.
On 28 August 2017, the Workers' Party filed an adjournment motion on the election to debate on the issue in the next Parliament sitting on 11 September. On 5 September, the Workers' Party was informed that their motion was not selected for mention as Murali's topic on community sentencing won the ballot. The Workers' Party eventually raised their query in Parliament on 3 October through its chairperson Sylvia Lim, who challenged why the PAP government uses AGC's advice as a "red herring" to evade justifying its own decision of starting the count from President Wee Kim Wee instead of the first elected President Ong Teng Cheong. She quoted instances where PM Lee Hsien Loong, DPM Teo Chee Hean and Minister in Prime Minister's Office Chan Chun Sing spoke on the matter in parliament, when they stated that the AGC's advice was taken for deciding the starting count. In response, Law Minister Shanmugam said that the Government sought the AGC's advice on whether there would be "legal impediments" to start the count from President Wee, and that the timing of when to trigger the reserved election was a "policy decision" that was not based on the AGC's advice, as parliament has full discretion on this issue. He insisted that the Government has not misled the public by giving the impression that the decision was a legal one, and pointed to some unnamed individual, "not from the PAP", who was deemed by the court to be misleading the Parliament.
In a Facebook post, Tan Cheng Bock highlighted Shanmugam's apparent contradiction when he was quoted saying in Parliament, "once we get the (AGC's) advice, we will send it out". Shanmugam responded by accusing Tan of "splicing and rearranging" his words, insisting that "it" refers to the government's position instead of AGC's advice. He also called Tan "bitter".
On 22 May 2017, human rights lawyer M. Ravi filed a constitutional challenge, stating that the amendment to the Elected Presidency Scheme "deprives citizens of the right to stand" for the office of the Elected Presidency, is "discriminatory on the grounds of ethnicity", and that it contradicts article 12(2) of the Constitution. On 15 June 2017, his application was dismissed by the High Court with cost. Judge See Kee Oon said during the hearing that Ravi had not shown how his personal rights were violated by the changes that were made to the scheme. See added that Ravi therefore had "no standing" as a private citizen to mount the challenge. Ravi has since filed an appeal against the court's verdict. His appeal was scheduled to be heard on 31 July. Ravi's challenge was dismissed by Justic See Kee On, a high court judge on grounds that Ravi as a private citizen had "no standing" to mount a challenge.
On 13 September 2017, Wong Souk Yee filed a court appeal for, among other things, an order for a by-election to be held for Marsiling–Yew Tee (MYT) GRC that Yacob had vacated in order to contest the presidential election. The contention was that without a by-election, MYT GRC residents would not be fully represented in Parliament until the next general election which was due in 2021. The appeal was dismissed by the court.
Criticisms
The People's Action Party has been accused of using the Presidential office's imperative of preserving racial peace as a way to circumvent democracy and shore up its political power. The government has relied on a survey jointly conducted by online publication Channel NewsAsia, and National University of Singapore's Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), both with ties to the Singapore government, to support its case that Singaporeans are voting along racial lines. This is seen by some [who?] as a farcical attempt at combating voters' racial bias which, at every election, has been proven to have no impact on election results.
The reserved Presidential election is also seen as an elaborate plan to block the candidacy of Tan Cheng Bock, who lost by a thin margin of 0.35% in the 2011 Presidential elections to Tony Tan Keng Yam, a former deputy prime minister. Some social media users have mockingly referred to the move as "Tan Cheng Block". The Singapore government has denied the accusation.
A 16-member Community Committee was appointed by the prime minister, based on the nominations given by the Presidential Council for Minority Rights, to assess whether a candidate belongs to a particular racial group. Former MP Inderjit Singh questions why a different yardstick is used for determining the race of an individual instead of adopting the existing standards practised by ethnic self-help organisations SINDA and MENDAKI. In a forum held at IPS on 8 September 2017, law professor Kevin Tan pointed out that the Community Committee's ultimate power to decide a candidate's race, instead of using the court, is unconstitutional. Norshahril Saat, a fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, criticised the racial classification process which relies on the judgement of a few prominent individuals, as elitist. Questions were raised on the implications if the committee were to, in a hypothetical situation, reject a Malay candidate because he is Christian and not Muslim, as it could be seen as an infringement on a person's constitutional rights to religious freedom. Cabinet Minister Chan Chun Sing responded that it is up to individual racial communities to determine whom to accept as one of them, and no one would dispute the decision. MP Janil Puthucheary suggested that in such a case, the hypothetical non-Muslim Malay individual could still contest in the next open election.