SINGAPORE: The difference between the ruling party’s Nomination Day swap of key Cabinet ministers across constituencies, and the move by opposition figure Chee Soon Juan away from Bukit Batok, lies in the promise he had made to voters previously, said People’s Action Party (PAP) assistant organising secretary Alex Yam.
Mr Yam said on Friday (Apr 25) that the PAP has been able to explain why its decisions were made and that they were “not willy nilly”, adding that the ruling party had “valid reasons” to do so.
“The difference is that Dr Chee made a public pledge not to abandon Bukit Batok, and days later, made the decision that he would swap. That is the crux of the issue,” he said of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) secretary-general’s move to contest the Sembawang West seat.
The evening before, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung, who anchors the PAP team in Sembawang GRC, had also addressed Dr Chee’s decision in his rally speech, calling it a “calculated political move” that was taken after a decade of not being interested in the northern area.
Mr Yam was speaking to reporters after a Yew Tee walkabout with Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, anchor minister of the PAP’s Marsiling-Yew Tee GRC team, on Friday morning.
The duo spent about two hours shaking hands, taking photos and handing out flyers at Yew Tee Square and Yew Tee Point malls, and the hard court in front of Yew Tee MRT station. They also visited the nearby Sparkle Care senior care centre.
Each political party is free to deploy candidates “as they deem best in the interests of voters and in the interest of the representation”, said Mr Yam, who has been in Marsiling-Yew Tee GRC since its creation in 2015.
He reiterated Mr Wong’s earlier explanation that Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong was sent to the new Punggol GRC so that “the east of Singapore has a good heavyweight minister, who would be able to carry the ground there”.
The late deployments of Mr Gan and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng, as with movements by some other parties, were carried out not “for exigency sake”, but deliberately planned to give the best chance for voters to make a decision, said Mr Yam.
“But here you have an individual who made a promise, who made a public pledge to do so, but yet changed his mind immediately after,” he said of Dr Chee’s switch to another constituency for the May 3 polls.
