ABSTRACT
With the opening of Singapore’s seventh Parliament on 9 January 1989, the transition to an entirely new leadership from that which founded the independent nation-state and charted its economic and political course in the country’s first two decades was all but formally complete. The retirement of fourteen senior People’s Action Party (PAP) members together with the addition of seventeen new faces in the government’s ranks meant that fifty-six of the PAP’s eighty parliamentary members have entered the assembly since 1980. Speculation about Singapore’s possible political direction under the New Guard was, of course, not new. Developments in Singapore have fostered contrasting interpretations of the significance of the leadership transition.
