One year after GE2025: PAP juggles energy crisis and other key priorities

SINGAPORE – One year on from GE2025, the PAP is grappling with the biggest energy shock in decades.

Singaporeans are starting to feel higher prices brought on by the conflict in the Middle East, and by the Government’s own account, the worst is yet to come. It has already rolled out a support package in April totalling close to $1 billion to cushion the impact, and promised more help if needed.

Before the crisis hit, the PAP had begun its new term in government with moves to address fundamental issues across the system. These included promises to restructure the economy to continue delivering good jobs, and to deal with sticky social policy issues in areas like education.

While these were key election promises during the hustings, the bandwidth to tackle these longer-term issues could be taken up by navigating the crisis. Managing the fallout from the conflict may be the top political priority – in no small part because having a full team to combat such an eventuality from global volatility was a key plank of the PAP’s 2025 campaign.

At the Fullerton rally midway into the 2025 hustings, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong appealed to voters that losing constituencies would impact not just the seats in Parliament but also weaken the PAP’s mandate and its frontbench amid increasing global instability in the wake of unilateral US tariffs.

“The storm will be here for some time, because the world has changed,” he said then. “For how long? We don’t know. But one thing is certain, this storm will test us, and if we are not careful, we could lose everything that we have worked so hard to build here in Singapore.”

Much of this rhetoric also centred on keeping Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong, who moved from Chua Chu Kang GRC to face a strong contest from the Workers’ Party in the new Punggol GRC.

PM Wong was returned with his full team at the polls on May 3, 2025, and subsequently brought new blood into the Cabinet, such as Acting Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow, who announced the April support package in Parliament.

The test has arrived, and voters will likely expect the PAP government to steer the country through the crisis before looking at more long-term issues. Said former ruling party MP Inderjit Singh: “With the turmoil in the world, I feel that the public is looking to the Government keeping their lives stable and comfortable.”

The pre-crisis agenda

PM Wong’s list of longer-term plans reaches across all areas of society. On the agenda is a comprehensive review of Singapore’s economy, a national artificial intelligence push announced at Budget 2026 in February and reforms to the education system to reduce the stakes of single exams and broaden the definition of success.

Labour and employment tweaks have also been made. The Government passed the second part of the Workplace Fairness Act in November 2025 and started a review of the Employment Act in August 2025, with recommendations expected in the second half of 2026.

The party has also moved on thorny political issues early in the term, after receiving a strong mandate at the polls with 65.57 per cent of the national vote.

It announced that a review of political salaries – a longstanding hot button issue – is back on after being deferred in 2023 due to what the Government called “other pressing issues”, including economic uncertainty.

Political salaries have not been adjusted since 2012. The Government has noted that while these salaries have remained stagnant, the incomes of Singapore citizens at the 20th percentile have increased by 87 per cent over the same period.

In a recent speech to the Administrative Service, Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that for Singapore to sustain the “virtuous cycle of good politics enabling good government”, it must, among other things, adopt “realistic remuneration policies for public servants and political office holders”.

The Government has also highlighted the critical need for immigration – another often politicised issue – following a historic low in fertility figures.

In February 2026, DPM Gan said Singapore expects to take in between 25,000 and 30,000 new citizens a year over the next five years, depending on demographic trends. It granted about 25,000 new citizenships in 2025.

He added that it estimates an intake of about 40,000 permanent residents a year over the next five years. It granted 35,000 permanent residencies in 2025.

Separately, in the realm of party politics, the PAP has also pressed the WP on race, religion and standards in political office, coming in the backdrop of the conviction of WP chief Pritam Singh for lying to a parliamentary committee and his subsequent removal as Leader of the Opposition by PM Wong.

How the Government will juggle the crisis along with its various priorities is the key question.

It could come under pressure to postpone the review of ministerial salaries again, or to ease up on issues that can be seen as attacking the opposition for political gain, as these matters become more challenging to sell to the public while the crisis eats at households’ bottom lines.

DPM Gan, while addressing the House on the Middle East situation in April, said the Government will press on with restructuring under the economic review despite the crisis, and added that the period should be used to sharpen the economy’s competitive edge.

What could change

In some areas, the crisis could be a catalyst – an opportunity the Government itself has flagged. Energy efficiency and diversification have become in some ways top of mind as energy prices at the pump and in the home have risen.

The Energy Efficiency Grant was expanded from six sectors to all sectors in the April support package. The scheme supports companies in adopting more energy-efficient technology by offsetting costs, and its expansion could nudge more firms to procure more of such machinery. As firms grapple with rising costs, the expanded grant should sweeten the transition to greener equipment for many.

The crisis has also underscored the need for energy diversification – possibly making alternative sources like nuclear energy more palatable to the public.

The Government has said it will not rush things on this front and that safety is the primary concern. Over the past weeks, it has signed more deals to beef up its capabilities in nuclear safety, including a training agreement with the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and its fourth framework for technical cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Navigating the crisis and ensuring that Singaporeans continue to have access to essential stocks take up political and bureaucratic bandwidth. Already, the April parliamentary session was dominated by the Government’s response to the crisis, although the House did still manage to move on other legislation.

The party has shown in the past a willingness to moderate tough moves in the face of a global crisis, but to carry them through on a longer timeline or a different form. In a speech in Parliament in 2022 on the goods and services tax hike, then backbencher Murali Pillai recalled the situation 20 years earlier when the economy was recovering from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the 2001 recession and SARS.

Then, the Government decided to stagger the GST increase over two years in 2003 and 2004, rather than to defer it, despite voices calling for a delay of the tax, he noted.

But some of the changes PM Wong wants to make on social policy are not straightforward fiscal moves. Education reform, for example, looks to warrant widespread consultation and political will, and Education Minister Desmond Lee has promised a heavy amount of citizen participation in the eventual change.

The degree to which this style of consultative and participatory government is possible amid the crisis is also in question.

Incorporating more of Singaporeans’ views in policymaking has been a theme of PM Wong’s leadership, and he has signalled a wider desire and need to work more with citizens across various areas.

Increasingly, the PAP has said it needs more than citizens’ buy-in to move on deep social and cultural issues that concern not just policy and infrastructure, but also how citizens behave within the system. The clearest example of this is the push for a “we first” society PM Wong presented at the 2025 National Day Rally, where he urged Singaporeans to adopt a society over self mindset as the country renews its social compact.

Dr Teo Kay Key, senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, said PM Wong’s government is steering the country in a very different world and era compared with his predecessors, which has resulted in more inter-agency collaborations for major issues like economic resilience and the low birthrate.

“Communications on policies, especially new ones, are more proactively produced, and there also seems to be a more consultative bent to the collecting of new ideas or suggestions,” she said.

But whether such consultative policymaking can continue to take root if the crisis demands more centrally controlled, top-down decision-making is an open question.

The challenge facing the ruling party is to lead Singapore out of the crisis, and yet maintain one eye on the horizon as it does so.