Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will step down next month and his deputy Lawrence Wong will take over, the second non-member of the Lee family to lead the wealthy nation. \u201cI will relinquish my role as Prime Minister on 15 May 2024 and DPM (Deputy Prime Minister) Lawrence Wong will be sworn in as the next Prime Minister on the same day,\u201d Lee said on social media on Monday. \u201cI ask all Singaporeans to give Lawrence and his team your full support, and work with them to create a brighter future for Singapore.\u201d Wong, who is also the finance minister, was chosen as Lee\u2019s heir-apparent in 2022 from a new generation of lawmakers from the People\u2019s Action Party (PAP) which has ruled uninterrupted since independence in 1965. \u201cI accept this responsibility with humility and a deep sense of duty. I pledge to give you my all in this undertaking,\u201d Wong said on social media. The 51-year-old, US-educated economist is widely seen as a social media-savvy stalwart who effectively handled the Covid-19 crisis when he oversaw the government\u2019s pandemic taskforce. The city-state was one of the first in Asia to quickly get back in the saddle as the pandemic eased in 2022, with business and tourism numbers picking up. Mustafa Izzuddin, a political analyst with consultancy Solaris Strategies Singapore, said Wong was already well known in Southeast Asia and to the two major powers most important to the city-state, China and the United States. \u201cI think he brings a style of leadership that\u2019s more attuned to a different generation. I think the core principle of what Singapore is about will remain because it is a system that has worked for many years,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I think his style may be maybe slightly different because he comes from a different generation.\u201d Outgoing Premier Lee\u2019s father, Lee Kuan Yew, was Singapore\u2019s first prime minister when it became a sovereign nation after a brief, unsuccessful union with Malaysia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will step down next month and his deputy Lawrence Wong will take over, the second non-member of the Lee…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16255,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}