Bloomberg, 25 May 2012At 4.09 a.m. on May 12, Chinese national Ma Chi sped through a Singapore stop light in his $1.4 million Ferrari 599 GTO and slammed into a taxi, killing himself and two others and sparking a wave of anti-foreigner sentiment.
The crash, caught on camera by another cab and viewed more than 7 million times on the Internet, prompted ministers to try to defuse public anger over immigration policies and the rising wealth gap that caused the ruling party’s worst performance since independence in last year’s general election. Within days of the crash, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean urged people on his Facebook page not to “blame all foreigners.”
With 3.3 million citizens and 1.9 million foreign residents, the government is under pressure to placate voters without disrupting the influx of talent and labor that helped forge the only advanced economy in Southeast Asia. Tomorrow, the first by- election since last year’s national poll will test whether Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s efforts to win back support are succeeding.
“The mood in the country a year after the elections is not good,” said Bridget Welsh, a political science professor at the Singapore Management University. “It’s a barometer of how the government has performed in the past year. The foreigners are becoming the punching bag.” Full story
