Nicole Seah: What To Know About The Ex-WP Member
She had her first political awakening at 17 years old
By Ang Qing -
Workers’ Party member Nicole Seah has resigned from the party after admitting that she had an affair with Aljunied GRC MP Leon Perera.
The resignation of the two party stalwarts was announced by WP secretary-general Pritam Singh at a media briefing on Wednesday, July 19 2023.
On Monday, July 17 2023, a 15-second video clip emerged online, which showed Mr Perera sitting at a restaurant table with Ms Seah, and holding and stroking her hands.
Both of them sat on the WP central executive committee.
We look at Ms Seah’s 12-year political career from her debut as the youngest female candidate in the 2011 General Election.
Ms Seah was part of a mass exodus from the Reform Party in February 2011 that was linked to differences in opinion within the party.
She helped campaign in Mountbatten SMC for NSP candidate Jeannette Chong-Aruldoss – who was part of the group who quit RP. Ms Seah, then 24, was later unveiled as the youngest candidate in GE 2011.
In the Marine Parade GRC contest, she went head-to-head with business consultant Tin Pei Ling, who was then 27 and the PAP’s youngest candidate at the polls that year.
In the media, Ms Seah billed herself as an average Singaporean who did not have a scholarship and did not study overseas.
Her eloquence and looks helped her gain favour with voters, such that local wits said NSP stood for the “Nicole Seah Party”.
Six days after creating a Facebook profile in April 2011, she became Singapore’s most popular politician online after former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.
Despite her popularity, the NSP team garnered about 43.4 per cent of the votes in Marine Parade GRC against the PAP.
Then Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong, who helmed the PAP team in Marine Parade GRC, credited Ms Seah with pulling down the PAP vote share in Marine Parade.
He said: “She communicated very well. She spoke quite persuasively to the younger people as well as some older people.”
In the years after GE 2011, Ms Seah suffered rape and death threats on e-mail and Twitter, and was reportedly stalked.
In an interview with women’s magazine Her World in 2014, she said: “Netizens posted my office address and contact details, along with the time I usually got off work. I was paranoid when I left the office, knowing that someone could be watching me.”
In a since-deleted post that was widely reported by the media in November 2013, she candidly revealed struggles brought about by being in the public eye.
This included the exhaustion of balancing a day job in advertising with house visits and walkabouts, feeling like a fraud, suffering a panic attack after her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis, and losing two jobs.
In a Facebook note, she also called her endorsement of presidential candidate Tan Jee Say in 2011 a “terrible, irreversible mistake” and said she was “arm-twisted” into doing so.
Ms Seah took a leave of absence from the NSP in 2013 and moved to Bangkok to further her advertising career the next year.
Later that year, she resigned from the party, calling it an extremely difficult and painful decision.
She said: “This is not a complete departure from politics as I continue to keep tabs on what is happening back home.”
After resigning from NSP, Ms Seah – who studied theatre studies and drama for her A levels – made her acting debut in the Singapore film 1965.
She played the wife of a police inspector played by actor Qi Yuwu, in a movie marking Singapore’s 50th year of independence.
Made on a budget of $2.8 million, it was released in 2015.