Mixed-race teams for presidential contest most plausible approach: Experts

SINGAPORE — Having presidential candidates contest in mixed-race teams appears the most plausible approach to ensuring that minorities in the Republic get elected as President, political watchers and constitutional law experts said yesterday.

One advantage of this approach is that it mirrors the concept of Group Representation Constitutencies (GRC) for parliamentary elections, which Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said has become accepted as an important stabiliser in the Republic’s political landscape.

It also avoids the possibility that the elected candidate’s legitimacy and mandate could be affected, unlike the approach of restricting contests to minorities periodically, they added.

The experts were commenting on Mr Lee’s remarks during the National Day Rally on Sunday, where he devoted a significant portion of all three of his speeches reiterating the need to ensure non-Chinese get elected as head of state regularly.

The experts agreed that it would be a “powerful statement of multiculturalism” for a country with a Chinese majority to have a non-Chinese elected by popular mandate as the head of state.

A commission headed by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon has submitted its suggestions for this and other changes the Government wants to make to the Elected Presidency scheme (EP).

Mr Lee has said a White Paper will be published in due course, outlining how these changes will be effected, before a Bill is tabled in Parliament. He previously said the changes would be made in time for the next presidential election, due by August next year.

The idea of mixed-ethnic group presidential candidate tag teams was among several floated during four public hearings the commission held in April and May to hear from the public.

It was first proposed by former Cabinet Minister S Dhanabalan, who said voters could choose from alliances of two or three candidates, wherein at least one member is non-Chinese. Members of the elected alliance will take turns to be sworn in as President during their term, and be given all the constitutional powers, while the other person can be Vice-President with no separate powers.

Political scientist Bilveer Singh from the National University of Singapore said rotating presidents will allow the office to fulfil its role as a guardian of Singapore’s reserves and appointing key civil servants, as long as all candidates are “qualified and of superb credentials”.

The GRC system, which has been in place since 1988, is a “deep-rooted” one that has been accepted and valued by a majority of the population, he added.

Prof Singh suggested that an alliance-based presidential contest be held after every three or four open elections — which should not disqualify minorities from competing — so that the Republic would definitely have a minority President at least every 15 years.

However, Singapore Management University law professor Eugene Tan felt the GRC-like EP scheme would raise questions of whether a minority candidate is “riding on the coat-tails” of the majority race or a popular running mate.

NUS law professor Thio Li-ann felt the Vice-President may be seen as a “junior or secondary office”, which may defeat the overarching principle of ensuring equal importance among all ethnic groups in Singapore.

Associate Professor Alan Chong, from the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, added: “The public may ask if we need to pay for two presidents.”

Another suggestion that had been put forward earlier was to occasionally restrict presidential polls to minority candidates. Assoc Prof Chong said this approach would allow the EP to be implemented with “virtues of the nominated presidency”, which was in place until 1991. “Then, nobody complained about Yusof Ishak or Benjamin Sheares,” he said.

Assoc Prof Tan, however, asked if this would adversely affect the “legitimacy and mandate” of the elected President. He questioned: “Will the changes enhance or detract from multiculturalism? Will this change be the start of our instituting group rights? How will it change what ‘meritocracy’ means?”

Nanyang Technological University Assistant Professor Woo Jun Jie, who is also visiting fellow in the Harvard Kennedy School, added: “There is a need to ensure that the electoral process remains sacrosanct.

“It is through this process that presidents attain their legitimacy. Over-adjusting it could diminish the President’s moral authority in the eyes of the public.”

Revamps of the EP scheme aside, Assoc Prof Tan said the main factor to consider would be how each candidate would contribute towards multiculturalism.

“The approach we are likely to take presupposes that only a President of a minority race can be a symbol of our much-vaunted multiracialism. We forget that it was what each did for multiculturalism as President that made all the difference, not the colour of their skin that automatically endowed them as symbols of Singapore’s multiculturalism,” he said.