Taiwan Election Recap: A New Direction for Taiwan

This past weekend, Taiwan held a general election for the presidency and the legislature. As in the US, Taiwanese presidents are elected for four year terms and are limited to two terms, though in Taiwan’s case both democratic elections for president and limitations on the president’s time in power are relatively new phenomenon, as the first popular election for president was only held in 1996 and the dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo both held the presidency for life, the former having previously been the president of China before he and his followers were forced to flee to Taiwan after being defeated by the Communists. Taiwan has been ruled by the Chiangs’ party, the Kuomintang (KMT; Guomingdang in Hanyu pinyin) since the end of Japanese rule in 1945, except for the eight year period from 2000 to 2008, when Chen Shuibian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was president. Even during that time, the KMT maintained a substantial majority in the legislature (not to mention the fact that most of the bureaucracy and military leadership consisted of KMT loyalists), which put severe limits on what Chen could accomplish (though arguably he and the DPP also failed to use what power they did have well). Even after two decades of democracy, there are still many traces of Taiwan’s long history as a one party state under the KMT, which still holds considerable assets that it appropriated over the years (before it started to divest some of its property in the past decade or so, it was claimed to be the richest political party in the world, and it still would probably rank quite high). While the most extreme China-leaning people have left the KMT to form fringe parties such as the New Party, not only has the KMT retained the support of most voters with stronger ties to China (whether due to family background or a desire to make money there) and those who have a particular self-interest in being pro-KMT (such as corrupt businesspeople with ties to corrupt KMT politicians), it has also had the support of many more cautious (or timid) Taiwanese, who even if they prefer for Taiwan to retain its independence from China are nevertheless afraid to challenge it in any way, such as formally or even indirectly asserting that independence. The KMT has also tended to receive more support from minority groups like the Hakka and the Taiwanese aboriginies, who – not without reason – see the DPP as favoring the Hoklo majority.

This history is what makes the results of this election particularly dramatic, even if it remains to be seen how permanent the changes will be. The DPP candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, won in a huge landslide, winning 6.89 million votes to 3.81 million for KMT candidate Eric Chu and 1.58 for third party candidate and former KMT stalwart James Soong, who was making his third (and hopefully last) independent bid. To put this in perspective, Chen won for the first time in a three way race with only [40%] of the vote, and while he won a majority in a two person race in 2004, it was a very narrow victory in which he won just barely over 50% of the vote. The current president, Ma Ying-jeou, garnered over 7.6 million votes in a two person race in 2008, which is still the highest vote total, but while this was enough for a large victory margin of over 2 million votes, even this was less than the 3 million vote margin that Tsai won by this time. The only time a winning candidate for president of Taiwan has beaten the 2nd place finisher in the election by a greater margin than Tsai’s was in the very first democratic presidential election in 1996, when the incumbent Lee Teng-hui of the KMT won a four person race in a landslide, beating Peng Ming-min of the DPP, who came in second, by over 3.5 million votes. But that was an exceptional case, as even many people who disliked the KMT and were more Taiwan-oriented voted for Lee, who after he left office revealed himself to be strongly pro-independence. Amazingly, despite the KMT’s traditional dominance in north Taiwan, Tsai won the most votes in every county except the two eastern ones of Hualien and Taitung and the two small island counties located just off the Chinese coast.

Not only was Tsai’s victory an unprecedentedly overwhelming one for a DPP presidential candidate, the DPP also won a comfortable majority in the legislature, which as noted above the KMT had always maintained a majority in, even during Chen’s administration. In a legislature of 113 seats, the DPP ended up with 68 and the KMT with only 35 (though in one particularly close race the KMT candidate has asked for a recount). This is in some ways a more important change than just seeing the presidency change hands. While a lot of Western media reports mention Chen’s administration, few point out the KMT’s retention of the legislature during that time, even though it meant that the DPP never had full control of the government. Now that has finally changed, and the DPP will be able to fully implement its policies.

So how should this result be viewed? All in all, it is a positive change. It is good to see Taiwanese voters be a bit more assertive about their own identity, though I should note that this vote should not be seen as exclusively or even mostly a referendum on Taiwan’s relationship with China. While that played a big role for many voters who have been disturbed by the outgoing Ma administration’s pro-China policies, other voters simply voted for change due to dissatisfaction with Ma’s domestic policies or with the state of the economy and their own place in it. However, even voters who chose Tsai simply out of dislike for Ma and his heir-presumptive Chu had to be at least aware of the differences in her attitude toward China, even if she remained vague about her planned China policy when campaigning. So while Tsai’s victory was not all about asserting Taiwan’s identity, it’s safe to say that the majority of the people who voted for her were at least comfortable with the idea of placing more emphasis on Taiwan as an entity separate from China.

Perhaps an even bigger reason to celebrate the results of this election is that the KMT has definitively lost power for the first time ever, and a lot of terrible legislators lost their seats (just to name one, the legislator who underhandedly passed the service trade agreement with China out of the committee he chaired, thereby provoking the Sunflower protests, lost in this election). Indeed, for many politically aware people in Taiwan, the KMT’s loss is the real reason for celebration, not the DPP’s victory. While the DPP certainly has a greater number of good people among its incoming legislators (including two I am slightly acquainted with personally), by no means all of them are great, and many are still unknown quantities. Likewise, Tsai is not perfect (she even expressed admiration for the awful Margaret Thatcher, who was the UK prime minister when Tsai was a student there) and we don’t know how she will perform in office. But it would be hard for Tsai and the new DPP majority to be worse than Ma and the KMT.

But this election wasn’t just a contest between the DPP and the KMT, and here’s an area where my feelings about the election are mixed. Taiwanese have the great fortune of being able to vote not just for president and the legislator representing their district, but also for political parties on a separate party list vote, with each party nominating at-large candidates who would be elected if their party won enough votes (the two DPP legislators-elect that I’ve met were at-large candidates). There were 16 parties on the latter ballot, ranging from strange to terrible to extremely promising. The best of the latter was the Green-Social Democratic Party Coalition, which as the name implies was a coalition between the Green Party and the newly established Social Democratic Party. Several members of the latter ran in the district races in Taipei, including one woman that I know through my wife and a couple more of my wife’s acquaintances, one of whom came in a fairly strong second to one of the few KMT legislators to win in Taipei (traditionally a KMT stronghold), while the others did quite well for political novices from a new, relatively unknown party with a small advertising budget. But while the coalition itself got a decent 2.5% of the party vote, a substantial improvement over the Green Party’s showing in 2012, this was still well short of the 5% needed to get any of its at-large legislative candidates elected, and somewhat short of the 3.5% needed to get election subsidies. This is regrettable, as Taiwan really could use an independent, progressive voice in the legislature to counterbalance the DPP.

Actually, one could argue that such a party did get into the legislature this time around. Only four parties reached the 5% threshold: the DPP, the KMT, the PFP of James Soong (which despite heavily benefiting from Soong’s highly visible candidacy for president received just over 6.5% of the party vote), and the newly-established New Power Party. This latter party was also created to be a progressive “third force”, and in fact several of its founders were originally associated with the founders of the Social Democratic Party (my wife says that one of the latter once came to ask her about one of the former, another long-time acquaintance of ours, as he was asking her to join their group, which had not yet transformed into a political party). But like too many idealists the world over, they quarreled over tactics and ended up forming two separate parties, regrettably diluting their strength. One of their areas of disagreement was that the people organizing the NPP wanted to pick well-known individuals as candidates, while the SDP preferred long-time activists (though some of the NPP candidates were that as well). Another difference is the NPP, despite its declared intention to be a third force to counter both the KMT and the DPP, ended up working fairly closely with the latter, even coordinating so that with one exception NPP candidates didn’t run in districts with DPP candidates and vice versa. The NPP did also cooperate with the Green-SDP coalition in this regard, but the latter didn’t work with the DPP, preferring to maintain more independence from the larger party, though they clearly preferred the DPP to the KMT (their ads said that they wanted to “bring down the KMT and keep an eye on the DPP”).

While the NPP’s approach was less idealistic and perhaps insufficiently independent from the DPP, it has to be said that it paid off, as the party won 6% of the party vote, thereby electing the top 2 candidates on its at-large list. While this is less than the 3 seats that the PFP from the party vote (the PFP also won one of the six seats reserved for Taiwanese aborigines, for a total of 4), the party also won three seats in district elections, beating KMT candidates head to head in areas that traditionally lean strongly toward the KMT. Among these victors was another acquaintance, Freddy Lim, the lead singer of the death metal band Chthonic, who we know through his work with the Taiwan branch of Amnesty International (he was the branch chairman for several years). His victory in particular was an upset, as the part of Taipei where he ran generally votes heavily for the KMT (the KMT incumbent’s desperate mudslinging in the last weeks before the election – for example claiming that Lim “supported” the young man who murdered four people and injured two dozen more on the MRT in 2014 because Lim had expressed support for abolishing the death penalty – apparently failed to work). So while my own top choice for the party vote if I was able to vote in Taiwan, the Green-SDP Coalition, didn’t win any seats, the NPP, who would have been my second choice, did quite well.

Nevertheless, it still seems to me that a lot of Taiwanese voters failed to make proper use of their party votes. While I can understand voting for the DPP on the party ballot (they would have been my third choice, and some of the at-large candidates on their list were quite good), it still would have been better if more people had instead given their votes to one of the better small parties. Certainly if the US had a party vote I’d use mine to support a small progressive party like the Green Party or the Working People Party, as long as they put forward good candidates, since while the Democrats in general are vastly preferable to the Republicans, many of them still leave a lot to be desired. If more Taiwanese voted for groups like the Green-SDP Coalition or even the NPP (if they manage to remain independent of the DPP), maybe someday the DPP’s main opposition will come from the left, rather than the declining KMT.

Of course we can’t be sure yet that the KMT is permanently in decline. The party still has a substantial base of support, and as noted earlier many in the bureaucracy and military leadership are KMT members or at least lean toward the KMT, though perhaps their predominance is not as overwhelming as it was a decade or more ago. If things don’t go well for the DPP, the KMT might make a comeback. Of course, that will be even more likely if the party manages to reform itself, something it hasn’t shown much capability of doing. But if it does, and in particular if it can reorient itself to be more populist and more Taiwanese, it might still have a long future. It’s true that if it completely abandons its pro-China bent it may lose some support from those Taiwanese who are strongly pro-China themselves. But then this group is a shrinking minority, at least if we are speaking of those whose pro-China leanings are ideological in nature (amoral businesspeople wanting to make money in China may be another matter, though the slowing of the Chinese economy may change some of their minds), and many of them have already abandoned the KMT for the even more extreme New Party, which regrettably managed to get over 4% of the party vote (not enough for seats, but enough for subsidies). However, they may have been helped by the chaos in the KMT, which as I discussed in a post a few months ago replaced their original candidate, Hung Hsiu-chu, with Eric Chu in part because the former’s exceptionally strong pro-China attitude was hurting the party in the polls. Those KMT members who actually preferred Hung may have ended up turning to the New Party, boosting their support, and if the KMT reforms as it should, they may just stay there. While I’d rather see groups such as the New Party disappear entirely, if they remain a fringe party that absorbs the pro-China extremists, perhaps they serve some purpose after all.

One other disappointment about the election came from the votes for the six aboriginal seats. Another acquaintance of ours ran for one of these, but while he improved on his showing last time, he still fell well short, despite being supported by many politically active aboriginal people, including most of the aboriginal singers and musicians I know. Instead, it was mainly the same old, mostly poorly performing legislators who got elected. We can only hope that Tsai’s policies toward the aboriginal people take their real interests into account, and that she listens to the voices of the young activists, rather than the hidebound conservatives who still hold most of the formal political power. Perhaps by the next election, more of the aboriginal electorate will become aware of how their current “leaders” are failing to protect their interests and will vote for new leadership. In the meantime, aborigines and non-aborigines alike can at least look forward to seeing what progress Taiwan can make without the KMT in charge.