SINGAPORE - Singaporeans go to the polls on Saturday as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong seeks a strong mandate less than two years into his leadership.
Nine days of campaigning, ending on Friday, were dominated by debates about a widening income gap, rising medical costs, job cuts and calls for a less authoritarian political system.
Lee's People's Action Party (PAP) has dominated politics since independence from Britain in 1965 and won 82 out of the 84 seats in the last election.
The parliamentary election will be the first real test of popularity for Lee, 54, since he took over as prime minister from Goh Chok Tong in August 2004 in a planned leadership transition.
The city-state, one of the world's biggest trading centres, is the wealthiest nation in Asia after Japan. It is dominated by ethnic Chinese and flanked by Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, and Muslim-majority Malaysia.
The PAP was denied a walkover victory for the first time in 18 years when opposition parties fielded candidates for 47 of the 84 seats. But analysts have no doubt that the PAP will win a comfortable majority.
Voting is compulsory in Singapore and 1.2 million voters are expected to cast their ballots at the polling booths, which open at 8 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. The first results are expected about two hours afterwards.
Singapore bans election surveys and exit polls, making it difficult to gauge how much popular support there is for Lee and for the opposition parties.
In recent days, opposition rallies have attracted crowds of several thousand people, but that may not necessarily translate into votes.
For Lee -- the eldest son of former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew -- to have a strong mandate, he needs to secure at least 61 percent of votes cast and lose no more than four seats, analysts said. That was the outcome that his predecessor, Goh Chok Tong, got in the PAP's worst electoral outcome in 1991.
If the PAP wins less than 60 percent of the votes cast or loses one of the multi-member wards where as many as six candidates run together, it would be a "major psychological blow" for them, said Song Seng Wun, an economist at CIMB-GK Research.
The PAP, which is fielding 24 new candidates, is campaigning on boosting the country's $118 billion economy and helping the wealthy city-state's poor and elderly.
Singapore's tiny opposition parties have never won more than four seats in parliament.
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