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August 12, 2026

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Elected presidency, GRC, NCMP schemes have served Singapore well: SM Lee

Singapore’s political system and long-term stability are much better served by the check and balance of an elected president, while the GRC scheme has protected and fostered multi-racial politics, says Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

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SINGAPORE: The elected presidency, Non-Constituency MP (NCMP) and Group Representation Constituency (GRC) schemes have stood the test of time and served Singapore well, said Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Wednesday (Aug 12).

“The true test of these three institutions was how they would work out in practice over the years and decades, and across successive governments,” said Mr Lee at the launch of a new book by former Deputy Prime Minister S Jayakumar at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs headquarters in Tanglin.

He said the late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and the country’s second-generation leadership “faithfully subjected themselves to what they had created” after introducing those major constitutional changes.

Mr Lee Hsien Loong said the overriding concern in evaluating the three institutions must always be Singapore’s long-term interests, and what will maintain a stable, well-functioning political system.

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“From that point of view, I am happy that all three have worked out well in practice. The institutions that Mr Lee and his team created have stood the test of time.”

The senior minister said the book highlights the trade-offs, intricacies and complications the leadership team had to consider, and sheds light on how they worked behind closed doors.

“How open they were to radical, out-of-the-box ideas. How intensely but objectively they argued with one another. How Mr Lee Kuan Yew, as prime minister, put forth his views robustly, yet repeatedly and indeed obsessively sought alternative perspectives.

“He was always willing to be persuaded to change his mind, and sometimes settled on a conclusion only after years of reflection and debate.”

The book shows what it means for the prime minister to be primus inter pares, or first among equals, in the Cabinet, and how Cabinet collective responsibility is meant to work, said Mr Lee.

CHECK AND BALANCE

Since the inception of the elected presidency in 1991, successive governments and presidents have “worked together to operate this system of checks and balances”, said Mr Lee.

Its detailed workings have been continually refined through periodic constitutional amendments, he added.

“But the core concept – that each elected government should spend within its means, and only draw on past reserves with the consent of the elected president – remains unchanged,” said Mr Lee.

The mechanism of the “second key” to the national reserves has also worked as intended, he said.

Political parties advocating more generous social spending in normal times have been forced to explain how they will fund their schemes, or make the case for changing the rules to spend more from the reserves, said Mr Lee.

“In emergencies like the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, the government of the day has been able, with the approval of the elected president, to draw on our past reserves to fund substantial emergency packages,” he said.

“This signified both the gravity of the situation, and the government’s capacity to do whatever it takes to tackle the crisis, backed by the substantial reserves that we have built up.”

While the elected presidency has fostered more prudent and sustainable attitudes towards state spending among political parties and the public, it is not “a complete panacea”, said Mr Lee.

The elected president must be equal to the heavy task, convinced that it is his proper role and responsibility, and also has to win popular support to get elected in the first place, said Mr Lee.

“And as experience has shown, it is not a given that voters in a Presidential Election will judge candidates solely on who is best qualified for the task, or who is most committed to fulfilling his custodial role,” he said.

“In an election, especially one decided by a nationwide popular vote, many other factors and considerations can influence the outcome.”

He emphasised that Singaporeans need to understand the harm that a rogue government can do to the country, and be careful not to elect presidents who will exceed their roles and responsibilities and cause the system to malfunction.

“But on the whole, Singapore’s political system and long-term stability are much better served with the check and balance afforded by an elected president than without,” said Mr Lee.

GRC AND NCMP SCHEMES

Mr Lee also touched on the impact of the NCMP and GRC schemes.

Since the introduction of GRCs in 1988, the proportion of MPs elected from such blocs has gradually increased, while the proportion of single-member constituencies has been maintained, he said.

Today, GRCs account for the majority of MPs in parliament, said Mr Lee.

“It is no longer seriously doubted that GRCs have been necessary to ensure that minority races are always adequately represented in parliament,” he said.

There is also no question whether the minority member of a GRC team enjoys the same mandate and political standing as his teammates, said Mr Lee.

“Importantly, the GRC scheme has also discouraged race-based politics. Parties that make overt racial appeals to one group risk losing support from other groups, as experience has shown,” said Mr Lee.

The scheme has therefore contributed significantly to protecting and fostering multi-racial politics in Singapore, he said.

On the NCMP scheme, Mr Lee said the primary motivation when it was first conceptualised was to prevent opposition voices from being completely shut out of parliament.

“In that era, it was quite possible for the winning party to make a clean sweep at general elections,” he said. “Four decades on, this is no longer a plausible scenario. Opposition MPs are routinely elected in general elections.”

While public expectations for more alternative voices in the House have risen, the government has also found it useful for more such voices to be represented in parliament, to engage them in robust and open political debate, said Mr Lee.

“Over the years, we have gradually increased the minimum number of opposition members guaranteed by the NCMP scheme,” he said, adding that the figure has risen from the original three to 12 today.

Mr Lee noted that this is more than 10 per cent of all MPs, and more than the 10 opposition MPs directly elected in last year’s election.

Two NCMPs currently top up the opposition presence in the House, and Mr Lee said opposition parties continue to claim to reject the scheme but in reality have never turned down an offer for the post since the 1984 election.

“On the contrary, they have made full use of the NCMP scheme to raise the public profiles of narrowly losing candidates, in the hope of improving their chances of winning outright in the next election, as has happened more than once. But this is par for the course,” he said.

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

Mr Lee said the journey of the three institutions showed that creating a constitution and laws suited to a country’s specific needs and circumstances is never a purely legal process.

“It demands a keen understanding of our society – its vulnerabilities, the likely problems and the solutions to these problems that have the best chance of working. This requires political experience and judgment,” he said.

He said the men who created the institutions were not scholars or philosophers, but practical men who governed Singapore and spent decades making this improbable nation work.

“They were acutely conscious of what made Singapore tick, where our faultlines were, and how very easily things could go wrong. They were not chasing ideological purity or conceptual tidiness, but what worked, and would benefit Singapore,” he said.

“They relied on their creativity and judgment to conceive and design institutions which were uniquely suited to our context, and which remedied real weaknesses in our political system.”

The constitutional innovations also cannot be divorced from their contemporary political context, nor the larger changes in Singapore’s demographics, said Mr Lee.

Two decades after independence, a major demographic shift was underway, and the pioneer generation that had run budget surpluses and built up Singapore’s reserves was fading away, he said.

“The next generation that would inherit the nest egg had not lived through the existential crises of the founding years. That motivated the search for ways to prevent a profligate government from squandering these reserves. Hence the elected presidency,” said Mr Lee.

The blatant racial appeals of some candidates in the 1984 general election gave renewed urgency to ensuring multi-racial representation in parliament, leading to the GRC scheme as a solution, he said.

Mr Lee noted that in the 1981 Anson by-election, opposition candidate JB Jeyaretnam won a parliamentary seat for the first time since independence, cementing Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s conviction that Singapore needed to create an outlet for a younger generation’s desire for opposition voices in parliament.

Having watched how Mr Jeyaretnam’s presence had sharpened parliamentary debates, Mr Lee Kuan Yew concluded that having opposition MPs in Parliament would keep ruling party MPs on their toes, which led to the NCMP scheme, the senior minister said.

He added that in creating these institutions, the founding prime minister and the younger ministers looked beyond the country’s immediate circumstances.

“Their predominant concern was not the present, but the future. They sought to build a constitutional framework that would last – One they knew the younger ministers would have to operate. One that would bind future governments, whether formed by the PAP or other parties,” he said.

Source: CNA/fb(cy)

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