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Is age an issue to be PM in Singapore?

Is age an issue to be PM in Singapore?

At the Inconvenient Questions post-General Election forum on Monday (28 September), an audience member raised age as an issue in the search for a possible successor to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who is 63 this year.

The audience member suggested that Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam’s age, 58, was why he was not being considered as the next prime minister.

Another audience member had earlier pointed out how other countries had members who had “worked up the ranks” before rising to leadership positions.

“But in Singapore, we suddenly parachute civil servants, army generals who have not worked their way through the party. Why do we have a system like this?” she asked, before saying Tharman was a suitable candidate to be prime minister.

IQ editor-in-chief and forum moderator Viswa Sadasivan said he felt the issue had come up only because Lee had said he may step down “soon”, and this in turn led to speculation about who would take over him.

Former Ang Mo Kio Member of Parliament Inderjit Singh, one of the panelists, said he agreed that Tharman being a ”contemporary of Lee” was the real barrier to him assuming the leadership mantle.

“I personally feel it will be quite reckless for us to have an interim prime minister for a short period of time, jeopardising the future fourth-generation leadership, who could run Singapore for the next 10 to 15 years,” Singh said.

Blogger Alex Au, another panelist, said there would be no worry to “find a successor for the next 20 years” if a prime minister serving one full term of five years was seen as acceptable.

“But apparently we are a special place. We can’t live with any little bit of uncertainty. We must absolutely groom somebody,” Au said.

Adding to the debate, AWARE board member Margaret Thomas brought up the fact that Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States at age 70.

“As far as this age factor is concerned, don’t forget that in America, we’ve got Hillary Clinton, who is 66 or 67, looking likely to be the next president for four years, who knows, maybe eight… So what is the big deal?” Thomas added.

See the full debate on Inconvenient Questions here.

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