The Epoch Times, 23 Sep 2011Both Malaysia and Singapore are nominally democratic. Yet both are what Fareed Zakaria calls “illiberal democracies”: "democratically elected regimes ... routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights and freedoms."
Both countries have been ruled by the same party, the Barisan National (BN or National Front) coalition in Malaysia and the People's Action Party (PAP) in Singapore, since independence. Both the BN and the PAP have used their country's remarkable economic growth over the past five decades—Malaysia's GDP per capita is now around US$7,000, and Singapore's is more than US$36,000—to legitimize their ongoing rule. Full story
