George Yeo for President!

For all that a number of the postings I stumbled across prior to Singapore’s General Election 2011 often appeared to be a tad tongue in cheek about the outgoing Minister for Foreign Affairs standing for election as Singapore’s next President, I am strongly inclined to support the idea of George Yeo for President.

Now that the results are in and George is quite definitely out of Parliament, I trust Singaporeans might give the matter some more serious thought and hope George can be persuade to reconsider the statement he has already made (referred to in Today newspaper on Wednesday May 11^th 2011) to the effect that he does not consider himself ‘temperamentally suited’ to the role.

Several bloggers have already suggested that perhaps what George meant to say is that he does not consider himself temperamentally suited to the role of obligingly rubber stamping anything and everything that gets put in front of him.  According to a couple of amendments that were made to the constitution of Singapore in 1991, the President of Singapore does have certain powers he or she might choose to exercise according to his or her own discretion, as demonstrated by Mr Ong Teng Cheong, Singapore’s only popularly elected President to date.

Mr. Ong, whose candidacy had been endorsed by the People’s Action Party (PAP) captured some 59% of the popular vote, a marginally lower percentage than that captured by the PAP Government of the day (61% of the valid votes in the Parliamentary General Election of 1991).  George might succeed in winning a rather larger percentage of the vote than Mr. Ong did in 1993, however, and very possibly a larger percentage than the just over 60% the PAP has managed to pull together in 2011. He might be empowered to refer to a stronger popular mandate than the present Government then, which might, without going so far as to disable it in any way, provide a reassuring check on that Government.  He might further be empowered to demonstrate to Singaporeans the role a truly popular President might play as a key member of Singapore’s legislature rather than as a Rubber Stamper.

That’s if and only if not only George can be persuaded to stand but some other eligible candidate can be persuaded to stand against him, of course.  I am inclined to agree that George might prove temperamentally unsuited to the role of President-Appointed-By-Default.  Candidates who have been awarded Certificates of Eligibility to stand for President need not go so far as to submit nomination papers until after they hear that they have been declared eligible, however, thus neither George nor anyone else would be required to confirm their intention to run until they knew whether the Presidency was going to be contested or not. 

(Note:  I have tried my hardest to check that the current President, Sellapan Rama Nathan, was afforded an opportunity to withdraw from both of the One Horse Races for which he entered, in 1999 and 2005.  I was unable to locate any kind of evidence one way or the other, however, and will appreciate hearing from anyone who knows where exactly such evidence might be found.)