ANYONE looking for pointers to the future of politics in Singapore will be making a mistake if they see only the big picture of a general election national swing to the People's Action Party of around 10 percentage points and what the PAP did to increase its support. The details of the results matter.

Certainly, there was a swing to the PAP which benefited it at the expense of the entire opposition, but there were differences in the swing that say a lot about the political scene.

The swing against the Workers' Party (WP) and the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) was lower than it was for almost all the other parties that have stood for election before: the WP's vote share in the constituencies it contested fell by 6.85 percentage points and that of the SDP by 5.57 points, which compares with losses of 14.32 points, 14.03 points and 11.2 points by the Singapore People's Party (SPP), National Solidarity Party (NSP) and Reform Party (RP) respectively. The Singapore Democratic Alliance suffered a relatively small adverse swing, and the People's Power Party and Singaporeans First (SF) had not contested an election before, but fared badly, with only 23.11 per cent and 21.49 per cent of the votes in the constituencies they contested. The WP and the SDP obtained a bigger share of the votes where they stood than any other opposition parties did elsewhere: 39.75 per cent and 31.23 per cent respectively.