IT SEEMS odd for Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s prime minister, to tamper with the political system. His country’s style of government has many admirers. Europeans and Americans envy how efficient and clean it is. Authoritarians, not least in China, gaze in awe at the ruling People’s Action Party, in power since 1959 despite facing regular, unrigged elections. The most recent, last September, returned the PAP with some 70% of the votes. One of the world’s best-paid political leaders, Mr Lee is also one of its most successful. Why fix a machine that ain’t broke?

Three simple reasons explain why Mr Lee, in a speech to Parliament last month, outlined a set of political reforms. First, this is a tinkering at the edges of the Singapore system, not an overhaul. He borrowed a metaphor from his father, Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Constitutions, he said, are like a fine old pair of shoes: “Stretch them, soften them, resole them, repair them.” They will always be better than a brand-new pair.

Second, the PAP’s landslide last September means Mr Lee is proposing change from a position of strength. He cannot be accused of panic measures to shore up PAP rule, as he might have been after the previous election in 2011, when the party recorded its worst performance since independence (a mere 60% of the popular vote). And third, Mr Lee, like his father, thinks for the long term. These, he said, are not changes for the next five or ten years but for the decades to come. What he did not say is that the reforms will help the PAP extend its rule far into that misty future.

All involve further refinement of the Westminster-style parliamentary system Singapore inherited from Britain. The first covers “non-constituency members of parliament” (NCMPs). These posts date back to 1984. As Mr Lee told it, the PAP, having faced no parliamentary opposition at all from 1965 to 1981, when it lost a by-election, decided to its surprise that it was good for government to have opposition voices represented. (This might also have surprised the late J.B. Jeyaretnam, that solo voice of dissent, who was hounded into bankruptcy, and was dismissed by the elder Mr Lee as a “dud”.) So the government mandated a minimum number of opposition seats—at present nine. Since the opposition never wins enough at elections, the others go to its best-performing defeated candidates. But NCMPs have not been allowed to vote on money bills, for example, or constitutional changes, or on motions of no-confidence (not that such a heresy is on the cards).

Now Mr Lee proposes increasing the minimum number of opposition MPs to 12 (Parliament currently has 89 elected members), and to give NCMPs full voting rights. Yet the opposition’s reaction has been churlish. Low Thia Khiang, of its biggest group, the Workers’ Party, said NCMPs were like “duckweed” in a pond—ie, they lacked roots (in a constituency) and were merely ornamental. A greater cause for worry is that the reform may actually reduce the opposition vote. Many Singaporeans want to see the government held more fiercely to account, but are wary of the inexperienced opposition coming anywhere close to office. Indeed, the Workers’ Party campaigned last year not to form a government but to be a stronger opposition. If that outcome is guaranteed, why not vote for the government?

Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore: An astonishing record The second proposed change is to so-called “group representation constituencies” (GRCs). These ostensibly ensure that the ethnic-Malay and -Indian minorities are represented. The public-housing estates where most Singaporeans live are subject to ethnic quotas, so everywhere probably has an ethnic-Chinese majority. Much of Singapore is now divided into four-, five- or six-member electoral constituencies, with parties compelled to include minority candidates on their slates. But these winner-take-all GRCs have had other uses: it is hard for small parties to find enough qualified candidates; weak PAP candidates can be swept into parliament on the coat-tails of a cabinet minister; and the distorting effect of Singapore’s first-past-the-post system is magnified, increasing the PAP’s majority. It was only in 2011 that the opposition first won a GRC. It barely clung on to it last year. Now Mr Lee wants to create more single-member constituencies and to reduce the size of GRCs; the opposition still wants them abolished. The third proposed reform is to the largely ceremonial presidency, which since 1990 has been an elected post, with important powers of veto over government appointments and the spending of its vast financial nest-egg. The idea was to introduce a check on the government. Now, however, the worry is probably about the possibility of a rogue president. In the most recent election, in 2011, in a four-horse race, the government’s favoured candidate only scraped home. The election, inevitably, had become political—a contest between the government and its critics. So Mr Lee announced the formation of a constitutional commission to review, among other things, the qualifications a presidential candidate needs—and, presumably, to tighten them.

Checks and fine balances

Singapore’s leaders like to attribute their country’s phenomenal economic success in part to the political system: one just contested enough to keep the government honest; but not so much that it risks losing power, meaning it can withstand populist temptations and plan for the future. Mr Lee’s proposed reforms are in that vein—making sure that the system has checks and balances, but only ones the government can control. As opposition leaders were quick to point out, they do not even touch some of the main sources of the PAP’s electoral magic: its public-housing programme; a pliant mainstream press; an election commission that is under the prime minister’s office; and a political climate, even now, where dissent seems a terrible career choice. That Singapore has thrived with so little real restraint on the government is also a tribute to the incorruptibility of the Lee family and their colleagues. Whether it can continue to thrive without them, and without more far-reaching political reform, is a gamble.