Incumbent Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said that was his last election at the helm and he tapped Lee Hsien Loong as his preferred successor.

Goh did not set a date, other than saying "I've said that by 2007 there must be a new prime minister but ... I cannot go in the middle of a recession."

Popularly known as BG Lee, after his military rank of brigadier general, the 49-year-old Lee has been widely seen as the prime minister-in-waiting, from the time he developed an interest in politics during his early schoolboy days and joined his father on constituency visits.

But the jury is still out on whether he is a replica of the hardline Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's founding father who drove the resource-starved island from third world to first in one generation.

"I don't think he is like is father. He can't be. It's a very changed Singapore now," said political commentator Seah Chiang Nee.

"But he will go back to the old style of leadership. Not the Goh Chok Tong responsive type of leadership. He will be tougher than Goh, but not as a hardline type."

In an interview with the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1999, Lee said he did not see himself as a mirror image of his father.

"I am not his personality and I don't have his history, personal experiences or background, so I have to do things my way," he said.

"I think that if I were not his son, I would have fewer constraints. Because then people would assess me as I am and they won't always say 'so-and-so, Lee Kuan Yew's son' ... which I don't think is a plus for me."

Older Singaporeans who followed Lee Kuan Yew through the tough development years after Singapore gained independence in 1965, do not rate the son as highly.

"He's arrogant, and he would never stand up to China like his father," said Jimmy Lim, a retired merchant.

But younger Singaporeans praise his strength in handling economic affairs.

Lee Hsien Loong had no sooner entered politics in 1984 than he was appointed a junior minister in the ministry of trade and industry.

His duties included heading a private sector committee to review the economy as Singapore entered a severe recession.

He was appointed Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore in 1998, and has designed and overseen the liberalisation of Singapore's banking system.

The development of Lee's public profile has been carefully nurtured to the point where it was he and not the prime minister nor Finance Minister Richard Hu who announced the S$11.3 billion stimulus package six days before the snap election was called.

Lee graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1974 with first class honours in mathematics and a post graduate diploma in computer science.

A decade later, he left the Singapore Armed Forces to enter politics, where he was fast-tracked to the front echelon making deputy prime minister in just six years in Goh's first cabinet after Lee Kuan Yew resigned.

Goh was seen as a seat-warmer, but Lee said he had disproved that.

"If you judge by how Singapore has done ... since he took over as prime minister, he has established himself. Nobody calls him a seat-warmer any more."

Lee Kuan Yew said in his memoirs that he could not have his son directly succeed him.

"It was better that someone else succeed me as prime minister. Then were Loong to make the grade later, it would be clear that he made it on his own merit."

But while successful in public, Lee's private life has not been without tragedy.

"Loong had gone through two major crises," Lee Kuan Yew wrote.

When his first wife Ming Yang died three weeks after giving birth to a son in 1982 "Loong's world collapsed," he said in his memoires.

In 1992, seven years after marrying again, Lee was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes. After chemotherapy treatment he has been given a clean bill of health, but political commentator Seah says his health is still an issue.

"I see his health as a possible weakness. Although he has been cured, can he stand up to the hard life, the long hours and the pressures of prime minister."

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