Singapore is a former British colony. The People's Action Party (PAP) has been in power since before independence in 1965. Lawrence Wong is the prime minister, having risen to the top job less than a year before the May 2025 election. He previously led a task-force dealing with the covid-19 pandemic. His predecessor, Lee Hsien Loong, who held office for nearly two decades, remains in the cabinet as senior minister.
The electoral system is dominated by winner-take-all, multi-member constituencies. Campaign periods are short: nine days at the 2025 election. A redistricting of constituencies was completed less than two months before the May 2025 polls, upending the ground games of opposition parties.
The Workers' Party (WP) is the main opposition party. It has few policy differences with the PAP and positions itself as a check on government rather than an alternative (sometimes called "PAP-lite"). It has been cautious about growing too fast, fearing that Singaporeans would think twice about voting for it if it ran enough candidates to form a majority government.
At the May 3rd 2025 election the PAP increased its vote share from 61% to 66%, translating into 90% of elected seats. Wong bucked the trend of new PAP leaders seeing dips in support at their first election. He campaigned on the need for stability amid Donald Trump's trade war, and sent the head of the government's tariff task-force to stand in one of the most contested constituencies. The party successfully defended every seat that the opposition sought to flip.
The Workers' Party contested only 26 of 97 seats but defended all ten it held before the election and will receive two more under a scheme rewarding the best-performing losing candidates. It received more votes overall than the PAP in the constituencies in which it stood.
Every citizen receives a lifelong training credit from the government.
Singapore's transformation into a rich business hub has depended on globalisation and free trade. Over six decades it drained swamps and cleared slums to create a squeaky-clean, multicultural showcase. When older industries declined, Singapore "upskilled", investing in sectors such as biomedicine and advanced gas-turbine maintenance. Its trade-to-GDP ratio exceeds 300%, among the highest in the world. On April 2nd 2025 Singapore received a tariff of 10% under America's "reciprocal" tariffs.
In 2025 Singapore introduced lessons on the basics of AI in primary schools.
Singapore hosts 60% of South-East Asia's data-centre capacity. In 2023 it awarded four new data-centre tenders: two to American firms (Equinix and Microsoft) and two to Chinese ones (GDS Holdings and a group led by Bytedance). Amazon plans to spend $9bn to expand in Singapore by 2028. Many American technology titans have their Asia headquarters in Singapore—including Alphabet, Apple, AWS, Meta and Microsoft—especially as the Chinese Communist Party has tightened its grip on Hong Kong, which was once the regional corporate hub.
Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia together host nearly 2GW in data-centre capacity, equivalent to the combined infrastructure of London and Frankfurt, according to Jones Lang LaSalle.
DayOne, a Singapore-based data-centre developer spun out of Chinese firm GDS Holdings (which retains a 36% stake), is a key player. Its biggest customer is Bytedance; its second-biggest is Oracle. Together, Oracle and DayOne are setting up a big cloud facility in Indonesia.
Manus, a Chinese AI startup, shifted its headquarters to Singapore in July 2025. PC Partner Group, which assembles Nvidia GPUs for gaming, left Hong Kong for Singapore in 2024. Bytedance runs most of its international operations from Singapore. Other Chinese firms have gained access to banned chips by renting servers in South-East Asian data centres, which remains legal though controversial.
In one attempt to circumvent semiconductor restrictions, a firm called "Luxuriate Your Life" bought servers from Dell and Supermicro that may have contained banned Nvidia chips, in an alleged $390m fraud. Singaporean authorities arrested three men suspected of shipping the chips to DeepSeek.
According to Henley & Partners, an advisory firm, Singapore's annual net intake of dollar-millionaires halved to around 1,600 in 2025, while the UAE saw a net inflow of nearly 10,000. Singapore's authorities have been combing over the books of foreign investors after a series of scandals in recent years related to family offices, and have been reining in the crypto sector, which is often used to move illicit funds. The mood is more laid-back in Dubai; many crypto firms are heading there. Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore's former prime minister, recently counselled rich incomers not to go "popping expensive champagne or driving Ferraris loudly at night".
Singapore is building a $20bn automated port and shipping hub.
Gan Kim Yong, the deputy prime minister and trade minister, is Singapore's lead trade negotiator with America. He has made winning concessions on pharmaceutical tariffs his top priority, given that the country's sophisticated pharma exports to America average around $10bn a year, embedding more domestic value added than, say, India's largely generic pharmaceutical exports.
Of course there's no reason for it, it's just our policy.