That same day, however, Mr Lee questioned the opposition for not acting swiftly with regard to the issue, saying they spoke out only after the ruling party had done so.
“You didn’t notice, you didn’t know or buat bodoh?” the senior minister asked, using the Malay term for deliberately feigning ignorance.
Mr Zainal Sapari, a former PAP MP, said: “While the overall approach was to focus on constructive politics, there’s also a role for calling things out when needed.”
It was part of a wider effort to ensure voters “get a full picture, even as the main thrust of the campaign stays positive”, he added.
Mr Inderjit Singh said: “The retiring MPs had credibility and have developed goodwill with voters, and their voices helped the new candidates get ground support.”
More generally, Dr Felix Tan said that where any “targeting” happened this year, they mainly centred on the parties’ electoral campaign moves involving certain candidates rather than taking issue with their character per se.
He cited the examples of how PAP zeroed in on Dr Chee moving to Sembawang West Single Member Constituency (SMC) and WP taking aim at Mr Gan’s eleventh-hour deployment to Punggol GRC.
This is not to say that allegations of dirty politics did not surface at all during this election.
Shortly before the official campaigning season began, screenshots surfaced online purportedly showing PAP activists planning among themselves to disrupt walkabouts held by an opposition party.
The party did not respond to CNA’s queries about these online images when asked about them during the hustings.
The PAP insiders who spoke to CNA TODAY said they were not aware of the alleged plan, but added that generally, the decision-making for ground campaigning activities were decentralised to the respective branches.
They said that such alleged behaviours are not in line with the party’s values and, if they were indeed true, may have come from some overzealous members.
Separately, a snippet from the draft of a speech by PAP candidate Edward Chia was circulated online, which included a line indicating that after Mr Chia had delivered a particular paragraph, a PAP supporter in the crowd would shout negative remarks about SDP.
This did not happen eventually. Mr Chia delivered his speech and that paragraph as prepared, but there was no audible response from the crowd.
Mr Chia, who contested Holland-Bukit Timah GRC, was speaking at the rally for Bukit Panjang SMC, which was being contested by SDP.
Asked by alternative media site The Online Citizen about the draft, Mr Chia responded that he had overruled it because it was “not my style”.
MUNICIPAL MATTERS MATTER
While issues such as the aborted Income-Allianz deal, last-minute candidate deployments and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) hikes dominated debates in hotly contested areas, other constituencies doubled down on their track record on the ground.
Ms June Lim, a PAP member involved in the campaigning at Pioneer SMC, described this as one of the factors that helped the party win with such decisive margins, because “voters know what we are talking about and could see the outcomes for themselves”.
“Ultimately, they are more inclined to vote for a candidate who will take action to address their daily needs or take their feedback. It could be as simple as a traffic shortcut or a new covered linkway,” she said
In Pioneer SMC, labour MP Patrick Tay was defending his seat against Ms Stephanie Tan from the Progress Singapore Party (PSP), a candidate who gained prominence for representing the opposition party during Mediacorp’s General Election round-table discussion.
