This is the third of five in a series on Singapore’s prospective next prime minister. See here for the second, on Ong Ye Kung and Chan Chun Sing.
Tharman Shanmugaratnam, 63, senior minister
May 7th 2015 is a day that will live long in the memory of many Singaporeans. At the forty-fifth St Gallen Symposium in Switzerland, the BBC’s Stephen Sackur, whose piercing questions on HARDtalk have left many guests floundering, took on then deputy prime minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam.
In a broad conversation about the Singapore model, Sackur critiqued, among other things, our form of democracy, the lack of press freedoms and our relatively weak social protections.
It would be a bit unfair to say that Sackur left with a bloody nose—unfair to Tharman, who never once engaged in the viciousness, the defensive moralising or the whataboutisms that one associates with many in the Singapore establishment.
Continue reading “Singapore’s leadership crisis: why not Tharman?”