When Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, died in 2015, he left the seeds of a family feud that have been growing ever since. Last week it exploded into the open when his younger son, Lee Hsien Yang, who is the brother of the current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, said that he and his wife were fleeing the city state for their own safety. “We feel Big Brother omnipresent,” he explained in a joint statement with his sister Lee Wei Ling. “We fear the use of the organs of state against us.” They also accuse the older Lee of having political ambitions for his son, Li Hongyi.
The rift is “a rare display of public acrimony at the top of this tightly controlled city-state” and highlights “the closely held nature of power” in Singapore, says the Financial Times. The original trigger of the schism was a seemingly trivial dispute. The siblings first fell out over the future of the family home – a humbly furnished bungalow near Singapore’s Orchard Road shopping district where Lee Kuan Yew lived from 1945 until his death.
The dissenting pair claim their father had ordered it to be demolished after his death because he didn’t want it becoming a “monument”, but say that their brother cynically defied his wishes and kept the house standing “to milk Lee Kuan Yew’s legacy” for his “own political purposes”.
“Ever since he was a boy, Lee Hsien Loong knew he was destined for high office,” says the BBC. “He grew up watching his father transform the city-state from a colonial backwater into southeast Asia’s richest nation.” He was born in 1952 and “inherited his father’s intellect”, garnering a first-class degree in mathematics from Cambridge followed by a masters in public administration from Harvard.
After joining the army, where he was swiftly promoted to brigadier-general, he followed his father into the ruling People’s Action Party, bolstering his role as deputy PM with additional positions as minister for finance and chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. He became Singapore’s third PM in 2004 – a role that now carries the highest salary of any elected world leader at S$2.2m (£1.25m).
Sometimes criticised for being “aloof and humourless”, Lee was seen as a safe pair of hands, although the continued role of his father as “minister mentor” convinced many critics that the old strongman “continued to run the island republic behind the scenes”, says the Asia Sentinel. Other useful posts were also filled by the Lee family: Lee Hsien Loong’s wife, Ho Ching, has been head of Temasek, the state investment fund, since 2002, while Lee Hsien Yang headed Singtel, the former telecoms monopoly that is still the most valuable firm listed in Singapore, between 1997 and 2007.
Prime Minister Lee has “made a rare public apology” for the latest spat, but insists it’s business as usual, says CNN. Yet the real significance, says Michael Barr, professor of international relations at Adelaide’s Flinders University, is that “this is the first time someone inside the family is acknowledging that we could be looking at a third generation of Lees”.