Singaporeans prefer a leader who is 'one of us'

Recently, a photograph was taken of a man in Singapore's most pedestrian situation - queueing up for food in a hawker centre.

The picture, however, was anything but routine. The man was Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, flanked by a security officer.

Half the Internet loved it, praising Mr Lee for being down to earth.

The other half howled in a storm of scepticism that it was wayang, or staged.

Look closer, though, and both reactions implicitly agreed on the kind of political leader that Singaporeans want - someone who is "one of us".

In this case, that is the quality of having the pulse and practices of the heartland.

The characteristic is even more important to voters now, given Singapore's rising income and social inequality.

Who wants to be led by someone who cannot envision what it is like to be in your shoes, especially as he or she can make policies that make life easier or harder?

Small wonder (now) that in the by-election last year, Punggol East voters chose the more folksy Workers' Party candidate Lee Li Lian, an N-level graduate who had campaigned there in the general election two years prior, over the People's Action Party's new man - colorectal surgeon Koh Poh Koon.

One problem with Dr Koh was his comment - "everybody has a car, we have two" - made at a time when crowded public transport was public enemy No. 1.

Criticism of him was that he could not understand commuters' woes because he did not experience them himself. And he sounded far removed from the average Singaporean - less than half of the families in Singapore own a car, let alone two.

The other problem was that he had been perceived to be parachuted in opportunistically, an elite primed for office, who could skip the hard work of pounding the ground.

That sent a message of him being less able to understand residents' needs.

Arguably, the more important aspect of being "one of us" is the ability to empathise with people on the ground. This does not strictly require living in a Housing Board flat, taking public transport and being bona fide middle class.

One does not need to be poor to empathise with the poor's daily struggles.

But it would help very much if one's interactions with the poor were not few and far between, nonetheless.

This has not fallen on deaf ears. Potential new PAP candidates have been deployed earlier than usual "to get a feel of the ground", in response to feedback after the 2011 General Election, said PAP organising secretary Ng Eng Hen in March.

Dr Koh, to his credit, is still helping out with grassroots events in Punggol East.

The civil service, a traditional source of political leadership, has made changes to put more of its elite Administrative Service officers in posts close to the ground.

But it must start even earlier and go farther than that.

PM Lee has urged more mixing at schools of students from different backgrounds.

And at a recent Sinda youth dialogue, Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said there was a need to "diversify the concept of leadership in society" beyond the stereotypes of attending top schools or working in law or medicine.

This is the right way to go.

The wrong way would be to place a premium on these characteristics to the exclusion of all others. This could encourage wayang, which would then deserve healthy heaps of derision. So far, most of Singapore's leaders seem to have avoided that.

In an interview with The Sunday Times last year, then-incoming Speaker of Parliament Halimah Yacob declared that she was staying put in the five-room Housing Board flat where she has lived for three decades.

"After all, more than 80 per cent of our population live in Housing Board flats and if it is good enough for them, it is good enough for me," she said, which drew uniform praise from Singaporeans.

So did a photo last week of Minister for Social and Family Development Chan Chun Sing, "baby pram and grocery basket all in tow" in a FairPrice supermarket.

In short, it is true that being a man on the street gives politicians street cred these days.

But being so must go far beyond obligatory photos taken doing "ordinary things", genuine or not.

This article was first published on June 29, 2014.
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