After 20 years in energy, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has stepped down, handing over rein to the deputy PM and finance minister Lawrence Wong.
Wong is the fourth PM to lead the city-state and solely the second chief who just isn’t a member of the founding Lee household. His ascent has come at a time when Singapore — one of many world’s wealthiest international locations — is plagued with quite a few challenges. The nation is witnessing rising value of dwelling, immigration, and financial inequality.
Here’s a have a look at who Wong is and what kind of points he must take care of throughout his tenure.
Who’s Lawrence Wong?
Born on December 18, 1972, Wong comes from a household that he describes as strange. His father had a gross sales job and his mom was a main faculty trainer. He grew up in public housing and, in contrast to many politicians in Singapore, didn’t go to an elite faculty.
Wong studied economics on the College of Wisconsin-Madison and has mentioned he went to the US because it was house to his favorite musicians. He earned his masters in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy College.
After holding a few of the most essential positions in Singapore’s paperwork, Wong entered politics in 2011. He contested as a candidate of the Individuals’s Motion Celebration (PAP) — it was co-founded by Lee’s father, Lee Kuan Yew, and has dominated the city-state for greater than six many years — and gained. Wong was then appointed to the board of administrators of the Financial Authority of Singapore, the central financial institution. Subsequently, he held the tradition, nationwide growth, and training portfolios.
Wong shot to fame throughout the pandemic for “unflappable manner when explaining robust pandemic restrictions to Singaporeans,” in keeping with a report by Reuters. In 2021, he grew to become the finance minister and a 12 months later, was appointed deputy prime minister and successor to Lee. He has been serving as chairman of the central financial institution board since 2023.
Wong likes to play guitar and his social media deal with is filled with movies of him strumming the instrument, together with one in all Taylor Swift’s Love Story.
What challenges does Wong face?
Throughout his tenure, Lee, the outgoing PM, remodeled Singapore from a backwater swamp to a world monetary powerhouse and high vacationer vacation spot. Its gross home product (GDP) per capita has doubled up to now twenty years, changing into larger than the GDP per capita of the US.
Lately, nevertheless, a brand new set of challenges has emerged for the nation. There’s discontent amongst Singaporeans over the excessive dwelling prices — Singapore is likely one of the most costly cities on the earth. There isn’t a minimal wage within the nation, housing prices have skyrocketed, and many voters complain that social mobility has significantly decreased, in keeping with a report by The New York Occasions.
Immigration has additionally change into a bone of rivalry — round 40% of Singapore’s practically six million persons are not residents. Lee’s authorities was “utterly unprepared to accommodate the excessive immigration they deemed obligatory for his or her push to change into a world metropolis,” Political commentator Sudhir Vadaketh, who runs a Singapore-based impartial information journal, advised the BBC. This led to “a really dangerous type of racism and bigotry” that persists to today, he added.
One other challenge is the rising backlash towards the tightly managed freedom of expression. Though Lee was much more versatile than his father — the outgoing PM repealed a controversial anti-gay intercourse regulation — criticism of the federal government and discussions on faith and race are nonetheless restricted.
Wong would additionally need to discover a solution to preserve Singapore’s delicate balancing act between China and the US, particularly as tensions between the latter two international locations have been hovering. Whereas China is the city-state’s largest buying and selling associate, the US accounts for greater than 20% of all overseas direct funding in Singapore, in keeping with a report by the Guardian. Singapore additionally has army ties with the US.
Wong’s social gathering, PAP, has been shedding political floor. Within the 2020 election, the social gathering’s vote share dipped to a near-record low of 61%, and the opposition gained a document 10 seats in Parliament, out of 93 that went to polls.
Given the mounting challenges and the following elections prone to happen earlier than November 2025, the brand new PM has his work out.
(With inputs from Reuters)