Taiwan Election 2012

Last Saturday was election day in Taiwan, with elections being held for both president and the Legislative Yuan (as Taiwan's legislature is known). For anyone out there who missed the news, the incumbent President Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomingtang (Nationalist) party won reelection over his Democratic Progressive Party challenger Tsai Ing-wen. The KMT also held on to its majority in the Legislative Yuan, winning 64 seats out of a total of 113. As anyone who has read my previous posts closely might expect, I consider this a disappointing result. While Ma is not nearly as awful as many other people in the KMT (or some in the DPP, for that matter), and KMT rule today is nothing like as bad as it was in the martial law era, the four years of his administration have not been good ones for the environment, Taiwan's sovereignty, human rights or plain good governance. I am not certain that Tsai would have been a huge improvement, but overall I have a favorable impression of her, and I think she would have done better than Ma (and better than Chen Shuibian, the DPP president who was in office before Ma).

Before the election, most polls showed Tsai and Ma as running virtually neck and neck, and Tsai was actually ahead in some of them. Also it was expected that James Soong of the so-called People First Party would take away a fairly large share of votes from Ma, perhaps enough to swing the election to Tsai. In the end, Ma won by a fairly substantial margin, getting 51.6% of the vote to 45.6% for Tsai. So what happened?

One problem is that many Taiwanese remain inherently conservative, and like voters elsewhere, they have very short memories. A lot of people seem to have completely forgotten the authoritarian rule of the KMT during the marital law era, or even view it positively as a time of growth (which it was, due to Taiwan's economic conditions at the time, not because authoritarian rule was actually conducive to growth) and order (at the expense of freedom of speech and many other liberties, but many chose to forget this). The KMT also prefers that the bad aspects of martial law be forgotten, criticizing any attempt to bring them up as divisive (if instead it faced up to and apologized for its past mistakes, I'd find it a lot easier to trust it now). Many voters now just have the vague feeling that the KMT represents stability, and so they are inclined to play it safe by voting for it (admittedly the DPP didn't help things by ruling erratically during its one period in power, though the KMT-dominated legislature of the time played a role in that as well).

One mistake that many outsiders are likely to make is seeing the Taiwanese election as purely a referendum on China policy. While the perception of the KMT as more pro-China and the DPP as more pro-Taiwan does play a role in many Taiwanese voters minds, and Ma's more China-oriented policy did win him the support of the business community (which is interested chiefly in making money in China, sovereignty and human rights be damned), domestic issues ultimately predominate in most voters' minds. For that matter, as some people have pointed out, the KMT now emphasizes Taiwan in its ads as well, claiming that its policies are the best for Taiwan. It certainly doesn't make a big point of being pro-China when it is addressing Taiwanese voters, claiming instead that it is for peace and stability. This is enough to convince many voters in the middle that the KMT is the safe choice.

The timing of the election (coincidentally?) favored the KMT somewhat. Taiwan does not have early voting or absentee voting, even within the country (though it should), so people have to vote wherever their household registration is. Many people from the south (which is strongly pro-DPP) work in the Taipei area. The election was held only a week before the Chinese New Year holiday, and many people didn't want to make a separate trip just to vote when they would be traveling to be with their families only a week later. Also, many university students had tests right up through Friday night, meaning they would have to rush back to their hometowns right after finishing their tests to vote on Saturday. How much difference this made is hard to tell. Probably not enough to change the overall results, but perhaps it could have affected particularly close races.

The KMT also had the advantages of large financial resources (even after divesting itself of some of its ill-gotten assets, it still owns a lot of businesses in Taiwan) and incumbency. Vote buying almost certainly went on in some areas, and with more money the KMT can easily buy more votes than any of its opponents. One constituency where vote buying has particularly been a problem in the past is the seats reserved for Taiwan's aboriginal population (six total, split into three for "Plains Aborigines" and three for "Mountain Aborigines). The aboriginal population is poorer and less well-educated, and there are far fewer of them (a total of only 215,000 votes elected the six legislators, with the third place candidate in the "Plains Aborigines" constituency getting elected with only 14,000 votes), which means anyone buying votes doesn't need to buy nearly as many. As a result, the KMT won four of the seats (with some pretty awful candidates), with the PFP candidate and an independent (a part-aborigine former pop singer who is disgustingly pro-China, even though Taiwanese aborigines have nothing to do with China historically) getting the other two. Our friend Mayaw Biho, on the other hand, despite having people like Ara Kimbo (胡德夫 Hu Defu), Panai Kisui (巴奈‧庫穗), Zhang Zhengyue (張震嶽), and Ilid Kaolo (以莉˙高露[小美]) campaign for him, only won 4,500 votes. Obviously the situation with aboriginal voters is particularly grim.

James Soong proved to be what I had already thought of him as, a washed-up has-been with little support, as he got less than 3% of the vote. Of course many of the people who supported him in the past tended to be even more conservative than a lot of KMT voters, and even less eager to see a DPP president. As a result, many of them probably chose to vote for Ma out of fear that Tsai would win if they didn't. But the PFP's performance in the legislative election was also weak, as it only got a little over 5% of the party vote, despite bold predictions that it would get as much as 10%. So the PFP, which is basically the James Soong party, only ended up with three seats in the legislature (parties have to get a minimum of 5% for two at-large seats, and the PFP also got one aboriginal seat).

It must also be said that this election was at least a vast improvement over the last one. Four years ago, the legislative elections and the presidential election were held separately, with the former being the first following reforms that cut the legislature in half and introduced the party vote. Some have argued that this new system favored the KMT, as several of the smallest constituencies, given a relatively greater weight in the smaller legislature, have traditionally favored the KMT, the more overwhelming support the DPP generally receives in the south did not translate into as many seats as the marginal lead the KMT has in the north, and also because the KMT could concentrate its much greater resources on fewer seats. Due to these factors and discontent with the outgoing Chen administration, the KMT won overwhelmingly, getting 87 seats to only 27 for the DPP. Since now the KMT will have 64 to 40 for the DPP, the former's majority has been reduced considerably. Likewise, in the 2008 presidential election, Ma won an landslide victory over the DPP's Frank Hsieh (admittedly a weaker candidate, in my opinion at least, than Tsai), getting 58.5% of the vote to 41.5% for Hsieh. So the DPP did far better this time (of course as 2008 was an unmitigated disaster, some improvement was to be expected).

This election was an improvement over 2012 in other ways. The Taiwan Solidarity Union, a pro-independence party inspired by former president Lee Teng-hui, only got 3.5% of the party vote in 2008 and thus failed to win any seats at all. This time it won just under 9% (compared to 44.5% for the KMT and 34.6% for the DPP) and got three seats. Some of this gain came at the expense of the DPP, which despite its poor showing overall got 36.9% of the party vote in 2008, but not all of it (the KMT's share of the party vote dropped a lot more than the DPP's, as it won 51.2% in 2008). While I have many reservations about both the TSU and the DPP and many politicians in both parties, it's good to see them do better, if only to counterbalance the overly (and, in the opinion of many, dangerously) pro-China policies of the KMT. Even better in my view was the improved showing of the Green Party. It got far less support than it should have, a mere 1.7% of the party vote, but this was a huge improvement on the 0.6% it got in 2008, and really not bad for a party whose campaigning was extremely limited in scope (for one thing, they refused to litter the streets with the flags favored by almost every other candidate and party). Other than the four parties which passed the 5% threshold for at-large seats (the KMT, DPP, TSU, and PFP), the Green Party actually did the best, outdoing the New Party, an extreme pro-China KMT splinter party that once was a real force in Taiwan politics but which only won 1.5% of the party vote (though admittedly the wacky "Free National Health Insurance Alliance" also won 1.2% of the party vote). If the Green Party can continue to increase its share of the vote, maybe in a few more elections it will be able to win seats.

Despite these bits of silver lining, overall the election results are still pretty depressing. They make me feel rather the way I feel when I see Americans elect extremist Republicans (which is most of them nowadays), Japanese vote for the LDP, Israelis vote for Likud or the religious parties, Egyptians vote for Salafists, or Europeans vote for any of the far-right parties. It certainly doesn't do much for my already shaky faith in the intelligence (or the open-mindedness) of the human race. But all we can do is keep up the struggle and hope things turn out better next time.