2025: Elections, Asean and anniversaries

Hello friends!

Working on a ‘what’s up in the year ahead’ type piece is tricky this year. Three of my major interests are simply tracking three fellas — Vietnam’s To Lam, Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto and Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra — who are all very different. That’s not really something that makes sense in 100 words. 

Instead, here are the concrete stories. They’re all for the first half of the year, with the Myanmar exception, which is interesting to me. A very top-heavy 2025! 

Elsewhere, a few people have reached out about great books of 2024. I did a list for 2023 but my reading last year was primarily very dense and fascinating Timor-Leste books. If you’ve picked up anything great about or from the region in 2024, please hit that reply I’d love to share!

Thanks,

Erin Cook

🇸🇬 Singapore votes — will it be a juicy one? (Maybe not, but we’re heading there)

“When the election is to be held... I have not decided, and when we start the process, people will know,” Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said back in November. The election is due before the end of the year.

The governing People’s Action Party will be hoping they got their timing lined up with last year’s succession from longtime PM (and Lee Kuan Yew’s son) Lee Hsien Loong to Wong in May. That should’ve given plenty of time — at least a year, punters said — for the electorate to readjust and show Wong can keep the ship right. Meanwhile, the opposition, whose ascendancy would be minor in any other political system but has put the fear into PAP, is battling a year of controversies. 

Next month brings us two big indicators. Wong will announce a budget update with a focus on job security and cost of living. I’d expect those angpao to be extra fat this time around. Elsewhere, Worker’s Party boss and opposition leader Pritam Singh will hear his verdict in charges he lied to parliament. He’ll back in court Feb. 17 and I, for one, am looking forward to an update on his lawyer. The budget will give us a hint to timelines and the Singh verdict will give us a hint to the stakes. After decades of some of the most dull elections in the region, I’m loving Singapore’s contest era!  

🇲🇾 Malaysia takes the lead in Asean, but is happy to share the head of the table

It’s Malaysia’s year in Asean and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim couldn’t be keener. The bloc will face much the same issues which have hamstrung it for years, namely how to respond to Myanmar and China in the region. Probably now something about Trump and the US, but I personally feel that, at this stage, fears are too ambiguous and undefined to worry about. 

When it comes to contemporary elder statespeople in the region, Anwar is the real deal. Hyper-experienced, domestically popular (enough) and with a reputation abroad that still sees him bask in Reformasi-era glow. 

So what’s the deal with this bloody All-Stars Team? Late last year, Anwar announced he had cobbled together an advisory board of former ministers and leaders from across the region to help shape Malaysia’s year at the helm. I don’t really think there’s much wrong with that inherently, what a wealth of knowledge and experience we find across this region! When he nodded at George Yeo and Retno Marsudi, former foreign ministers of Singapore and Indonesia respectively, I thought that seemed reasonable enough. 

But then there’s former (with an asterisk next to it that will surely only grow this year) Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in the mix. Thai media is also whispering Cambodia’s former prime minister Hun Sen’s name. Which makes me wonder — is this an advisory board of the region’s technocrats, or is this a meeting room for reputation rehabilitation?  

The only people who appear to be impressed rather than puzzled are Thai op-ed writers. It’s a display of ‘political astuteness,’ wrote Kavi Chongkittavorn over at the Bangkok Post late last year. I’m still cynical about all this. I think Anwar loves a splashy headline but I’m not sure he loves sharing the spotlight too much. But Thailand, as the giant in that pocket of the region, has been more than happy to take the initiative in the recent past when it comes to Myanmar. Maybe this could have the effect of keeping everyone aligned. We’ll see. 

🇵🇭 Ballots, dynasties and maybe the AI apocalypse

I haven’t been this excited about an election in a long time. This May, Filipinos head to the polls for the midterms in which a dozen senate spots and the whole House go up. Already seismic, but with the last 18 months of bickering between the Marcos and Duterte Malacañang threatening all-out war how alliances fall this year will shape the years — and the presidential election — ahead. 

However, on a level that may prove even more significant is AI usage in the race. Last year’s monster year of elections caused a lot of anxiety about how AI would be used and abused across the world. Turns out Indonesia, India and the US didn’t need a computer’s help in making things messy and the year passed without major incident. We have known for years that the Philippines is ground zero for testing all sorts of nefarious tech and I deeply believe that if this stuff is at the point we are being warned it is, we would begin seeing it in the Philippines shortly. Which is kind of intriguing, no? At this point, I haven’t seen anything to suggest the usual political argy-bargy in this space has been AI-ified, so maybe it really isn’t there yet. Hell, with these Dutertes it doesn’t matter anyway. 

🇲🇲 Year four

February 1 this year will be four years since the Myanmar military seized power, deposed the democratically elected government and threw the country into chaos. Four years, can you believe it! Every year feels like it’s vital the country, and it is. But something about the state of play right now really gives the impression that Myanmar is on the edge of a turn. Where that turn goes — and in such a fractured space, who is included — feels very up in the air. On that, my main new year’s resolution for this newsletter is to more consistently issue fortnightly updates on the country.