The Seat He Gave Away

In 2015, Gerald Giam was offered a seat in Parliament.

He gave it to someone else.

His Workers' Party team had just lost East Coast GRC for the second time. But their vote share was strong enough to qualify for a Non-Constituency MP seat. As the team leader, the seat was his to take.

He proposed within the party that his teammate, Leon Perera, take it instead.

No press conference. No public explanation. He just handed his microphone to someone else because he believed they'd use it well.

Five years later, Leon Perera would be elected to Parliament as part of the Aljunied GRC team. Three years after that, Perera would resign from WP and from Parliament over a personal matter.

Gerald Giam didn't know any of that would happen. He made the call in 2015 with the information he had: his teammate could do good work in that seat. So he stepped aside.

If you've ever promoted someone over yourself because you believed in them more than in your own ambition, you know what that decision costs.

But the NCMP seat he gave away is only the beginning of the story.

Gerald Giam joined the Workers' Party in 2009. He was 31. A tech entrepreneur who'd co-founded an IT solutions company where he served as CTO. Before that, he'd been a senior consultant at Avanade, a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture. Before that, a project manager at MSC Consulting. And before all of it, a foreign service officer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

MFA to IT to opposition politics. That's not a career path anyone teaches at Anglo-Chinese School (Independent), where he studied, or at Anglo-Chinese Junior College, or at the University of Southern California, where he earned his engineering degree.

He also holds a Master of Science in International Political Economy from NTU. He's a Registered Management Consultant. He's Peranakan Chinese. He's a Christian. He's married to a chartered accountant. Two kids.

The resume reads like someone who should be running a GLC, not knocking on doors in Bedok Reservoir at 9pm on a Saturday.

He ran for the first time in 2011. East Coast GRC. His five-member WP team lost with 45.2%. But 45.2% was strong enough to earn him the NCMP seat, which he accepted.

He described the term as "strenuous but rewarding."

In 2015, he went back to East Coast. Lost again. This time, as we've covered, he gave the NCMP seat away.

No seat, no title, no parliamentary platform. Just a party volunteer doing house visits in Fengshan, covering the ward block by block, night after night.

For five years.

"In the years leading up to the GE, I'd been spending a lot of time in grassroots work in Fengshan, doing house visits and food distribution. I mean, we pretty much covered the whole ward."

He was preparing for a third run at East Coast. Or Fengshan. Either way, he'd done the ground work. He knew the estates. He knew the residents. He was ready.

Then the party called and said: you're going to Aljunied.

Low Thia Khiang and Chen Show Mao had announced they wouldn't contest in GE2020. Gerald Giam and Leon Perera were named as their replacements on the Aljunied slate alongside Pritam Singh, Sylvia Lim, and Faisal Manap.

The fight Gerald had spent five years preparing for wasn't the fight he got.

"I was fully expecting to go back to either East Coast or Fengshan," he said. But the party needed him somewhere else.

He went.

On July 10, 2020, the WP won Aljunied GRC with 59.95%. Gerald Giam, at age 42, became an elected Member of Parliament for the first time.

After two losses, one NCMP term, one NCMP seat given away, and five years of ground work in a constituency he would never represent.

The adjustment, he said, was "almost like night and day."

"When you are an elected MP, people expect you to solve their problems."

CNA captured what that looks like in practice. A Saturday morning in Hougang. Gerald squatting beside a coffee shop table, listening to a resident talk about a missing ramp. Forty minutes later, still at the same coffee shop. Another resident taking him behind the building to show him a pavement he wasn't happy with. Four WP volunteers trailing behind, writing down every complaint.

Drain covers, pavements, and ramps. The kind of work that doesn't make the news and doesn't win awards.

When asked about the challenges of being an opposition MP in Singapore, he could have given the standard answer. The grassroots adviser issue. The upgrade delays. The structural disadvantages. He'd heard it all.

Instead, he said: "I would rather try and dwell on what the opportunities are."

That sentence tells you everything about how Gerald Giam operates. He doesn't fight the system. He works within it and tries to shift it, one policy paper at a time.

In 2022, the CEC elected him Head of Policy Research. His job was to lead the team that formulates WP's positions on everything from economic inequality to healthcare to worker protections.

In February 2023, he asked in Parliament whether NSF allowances could be raised to keep pace with inflation. The government initially pushed back. By July 2023, monthly NSF allowances rose by between S$125 and S$200, an increase of 10.9 to 21.7 percent.

He didn't get credit for it. The government framed it as their own initiative. But the timeline is right there for anyone who cares to look.

In February 2024, he delivered an adjournment motion on AI industrial policy, arguing that Singapore should fund "moonshot" healthcare AI projects built on population-scale clinical data. In 2025, the Ministry of Health established the SIMFONI programme to develop healthcare AI foundation models.

Again, no credit. Again, the timeline speaks.

In 2024, he was appointed Chairman of the Aljunied-Hougang Town Council. The administrative engine behind every lift repair, every grass-cutting schedule, every broken light in the opposition-held wards. The role nobody wants because the headlines only come when something goes wrong.

He took it.

Gerald Giam lost two elections, gave away one seat, prepared for a fight he never got, won a fight he didn't choose, and now runs the town council that everyone scrutinizes and nobody thanks.

If you've ever been the person in the organisation who does the work that makes the headlines possible for someone else, who writes the policy paper that becomes someone else's talking point, who gives the promotion to a teammate and goes back to the ground floor, you know Gerald Giam's story.

It's the story of the person who never gets the profile piece.

Until now.