Tharman Shanmugaratnam (born 25 February 1957), more commonly known mononymously as Tharman, is a Singaporean politician, economist and statesman who is the 9th and current president of Singapore. Prior to his presidency, Tharman served as Senior Minister of Singapore between 2019 and 2023, Coordinating Minister for Social Policies between 2015 and 2023, and Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore between 2011 and 2023.
Tharman is an economist in roles principally related to economic and social policies. He has also led various international councils and panels simultaneously. Tharman currently chairs the Board of Trustees of the Group of Thirty, a global council of economic and financial leaders from the public and private sectors and academia. He also co-chairs the Global Commission on the Economics of Water with Ngozi Owonjo-Iweala, Mariana Mazzucato and Johan Rockström. Its initial recommendations helped shape the outcomes of the UN Water Conference in March 2023. Tharman has also been co-chair of the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Global Financing for Pandemic Preparedness and Response since 2021. In 2017, Tharman was appointed to chair the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance.
A former member of the governing People's Action Party (PAP), he was the Member of Parliament (MP) representing the Taman Jurong division of Jurong GRC between 2001 and 2023. He also served as Deputy Prime Minister between 2011 and 2019, Minister for Finance between 2007 and 2015, Minister for Education between 2003 and 2008.
Tharman made his political debut in the 2001 general election, and has been re-elected to Parliament four times at subsequent general elections in 2006, 2011, 2015 and 2020. On 8 June 2023, Tharman announced his intention to run for the 2023 presidential election and his scheduled resignation on 7 July 2023 from all his positions in the government and as a member of the PAP, as the presidency is a non-partisan office. On 2 September 2023, Tharman was announced as the winner after receiving 70.40% of the vote in a landslide victory and was elected as the ninth president of Singapore. He is the first presidential candidate not of Chinese descent to win in a contested presidential election in Singapore.
Early life and education
Tharman was born in Singapore in 1957, to a family of Sri Lankan Tamil ancestry. In his youth, Tharman attended the Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) before graduating from the London School of Economics (LSE) with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics. (LSE later awarded him an Honorary Fellowship in 2011).
He subsequently went on to Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, where he completed a Master of Philosophy degree in economics. He then became a student at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, where he completed a Master in Public Administration (MPA) degree and was a recipient of the Lucius N. Littauer Fellows Award (given to MPA students who demonstrate academic excellence and leadership).
Tharman was a student activist while studying in the United Kingdom during the 1970s. He originally held socialist beliefs, but his views on economics evolved over the course of his working career.
Early career
Tharman started his working career at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), where he became its chief economist. He later joined the Singapore Administrative Service and served in the Ministry of Education as Senior Deputy Secretary for Policy, before returning to the MAS where he eventually became its managing director. He was awarded the Public Administration Medal (Gold) in 1999. He resigned as managing director of the MAS to contest in the 2001 general election as a candidate for the People's Action Party.
Official Secrets Act case
While serving as director of the Economics Department of the MAS in 1992, Tharman was one of five persons charged under the Official Secrets Act (OSA) in a case involving the publication of Singapore's 1992 second-quarter flash GDP growth projections in the Business Times newspaper. The others included the editor, Patrick Daniel, of the Business Times.