Lee Kuan Yew loses monopoly

Press, 2 November 1981, Page 8

Lee Kuan Yew loses monopoly

NZPA-Reuter Singapore The governing People’s Action Party lost its 13-year total domination of the Singapore Parliament when the opposition Workers Party won a keenly contested byelection on Saturday. The secretary-general of the Workers Party, J. B. Jeyaratnam, defeated his P.A.P. opponent, Pang Kim Hin, by a narrow 650-vote margin, but it gave the Opposition for the first time since 1968 a voice in the State’s legislature. It was the sixth attempt for Mr Jeyaratnam, a / practising lawyer, who stood on a platform calling for more freedom and an end to the one-party rule of the Prime Minister (Mr Lee Kuan Yew). - The by-election, the first, held since the P.AP. swept all the 75 seats in Parliament last December, was for the Anson constituency vacated by C. V. Devan Nair who became the President of the island republic, a ceremonial post. Pandemonium broke out among the 3000 people gathered outside a school where the by-election result was announced, and the P.A.P.

candidate, a 32-year-old Canadian train mechanical engineer, made a quiet exit. About 500 members of the police riot squad cordoned off the school as supporters, waving party flags, cheered their candidate in an emo-tion-charged atmospherre. But there were no incidents. “Let us welcome a dawn of a happy Singapore. Please do not consider me only as an M-P- for Anson, but consider me as a representative of the silent majority,” Mr Jeyaratnam told the gathering. The P.A.P.’s organising secretary, Goh Chok Tong, who is also the Health Minister, said: “This is not the end of the world for the P.A.P.” Other senior P.A.P. officials said, however, that the result indicated that the expectations of the Singapore voters were too high. As in the past, the P.A.P, stood on its economic performance which has made Singapore one of the major financial and industrial centres in South-East Asia. In the December General Election the P.A.P. won 84 per cent of the total 14,500 votes in the Anson constituency.