(Bloomberg) -- Singapore headed to the polls Friday as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s ruling party seeks to extend its 55-year rule with a fresh mandate to counter the city-state’s worst-ever recession amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Wearing masks and observing strict social distancing at polling booths, all voters will have their temperature screened as authorities work to ensure safety amid the Covid-19 outbreak that’s shaken the city-state. Counting will begin immediately after polls close at 8:00 p.m., with the final outcome likely to be clear late Friday or early Saturday.
While Singapore bans opinion polls during election campaigns, analysts and the opposition parties expect the ruling People’s Action Party to form the next government. It’s been in power since the country’s independence in 1965 and has never won less than 93% of parliamentary seats, despite seeing its popular vote slip as low as 60% in 2011.
Here are the latest updates:
Teething problems (4:50 p.m.)
“I think the queues are a bit longer. But the officers are trying their best,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was cited as saying by Channel News Asia before casting his vote.
“From what I know, the teething problems have been sorted out and it’s running smoothly now.”
Ruling party’s challenge (1:15 p.m.)
The People’s Action Party (PAP) came to the election confident that voters would endorse its Covid-19 response, the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute Malaysia honorary research associate, Bridget Welsh, told Bloomberg TV in an interview Friday.
“I think they will get a majority of the voters to do that,” Welsh said. “But at the same time, the campaign itself has been very negative. The PAP has been on the defensive. The issues that have been raised will be things that PAP will have to grapple with irrespective of what happens in the contest.
“It puts PAP very much in the hot seat given the fact that they have not controlled the election narrative.”
Long queues and disposable gloves (12 p.m.)
The Elections Department apologized for the longer-than-usual queues for voting, caused when people arrived outside their assigned time for casting their vote.
“This, together with measures that had been put in place to ensure safe voting, had led to long queues,” the department said in a statement. “To address the long wait, we did away with the requirement to don disposable gloves, as voters would already be required to sanitize their hands. We observed that this step in particular contributed to the longer than usual voting times. Gloves are still available for voters who would like to use both sanitizer and gloves.”
Polls open (8:00 a.m.)
Singaporeans began voting in what could be Lee’s final election before he hands power to the so-called “fourth generation” of People’s Action Party (PAP) officials led by Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat, who have helped spearhead the government’s response to Covid-19.
Any drop in support compared with the last election in 2015 -- or even a more extreme scenario where the PAP fails to win a two-thirds majority in Parliament for the first time -- could potentially affect Lee’s succession plan or prompt the government to adopt more populist measures like it did in 2011 following its worst-ever result
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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