And at the sight of this tasty single seat constituency all notions of Opposition solidarity flies out of the window and they all scramble in haste to make a grab to lay their claim. SDP in particular made a gaffe by publicly announcing a shocking offer to WP for their idea of a collaboration for Punggol-East - that the SDP's candidate gets the endorsement and support of the WP, and the Parliamentary seat as well if they win, while the WP get the dubious honor of running the Punggol town council.
Predictably, the WP rejected SDP's offer after careful consideration - they probably spend more time crafting the words of the rejection than actually considering whether there's a glimmer of feasibility in it.
Some parties, however, are not so happy. They seem hang on to a notion that the opposition parties are in a grand alliance alike Malaysia's PKR, that they all should make sacrifices and work towards the noble goal of bringing down the ruling party. WP, by virtue of being the strongest opposition party, got alot of flak for not working with the other parties to avoid a unavoidable multi-cornered fight at Punggol East.
I was reading this article, which actually attempted to talk some sense into the SDP's proposal. The author tried to explain that the split is actually quite fair - by highlighting that the SDP is know for being outspoken, hence they can contribute by bringing a stronger message in Parliament, while the WP is particular known for their extensive efforts at the ground level, hence they can continue and expand on that by taking over the Punggol East Town council.
I pretty much disagreed with the author - fair splitting is one party doing the splitting and the other party getting to choose from the split portions, not a single party doing the splitting and choosing. More importantly, I feel that while the WP's favoured approach is to work the ground of the constituency, I doubt that they have a fetish for estate management (ie town council work) - the ground work is a means to an end, which is getting the seat in the Parliament.
In the comments section of the webby above, one of the posters commented :
"Now if the SDP pushes into a multi-cornered fight, then its overarching goal would be to demonstrate that it will not put up with bullying. (And I'm told, that a few other political parties are backing the SDP up on this.)"
How does WP's refusal to accept SDP's proposal make WP a bully?
It is the right of SDP and other parties to compete in the PE by-election - did the WP declare somewhere that the other parties cannot take part? Did the WP take any action to negatively impact the other candidates from taking part?
Unlike the general election where there's a broad electoral map to make compromises, this time round there's one and only one battle ground and very little space for concessions to be made over it. If the WP is committed to contesting, there is case to argue that it's possibly pointless to meet up with SDP, opening them to the onus of also consulting other parties and even independent candidates. How then can the pie be split amongst 5+ parties?
