TAIWAN
ELECTION Four 'bullets' change Taiwan
politics By Macabe
Keliher
TAIPEI - Four bullets - one of them very
real and fired by a would-be assassin, the others
metaphoric but penetrating - have changed Taiwan's body
politic.
On Friday afternoon, just 18 hours
before the polling places opened in Taiwan's third
presidential election, the incumbent president was shot.
Chen Shui-bian got a slug in the belly as he campaigned
in his home town of Tainan among fervent supporters (and
a few zealous fans from the opposition, it seems) - one
of four bullets that are said to have won re-election
for Chen.
The other three bullets - a
referendum, invalid ballots, and cash - although
metaphorical, were no less lethal for the joint
Kuomintang (KMT), People First Party (PFP) opposition
ticket, known as the pan-blues. Having defeated the
pan-blues by a slim margin of fewer than 30,000 votes,
or 0.23 percent of total votes cast, those four bullets
led the pan-blues in a fit of crying foul after they
discovered on Saturday night that they had lost. Their
howls of suspicion (if lacking concrete accusations)
sparked isolated riots around the island, and are
generating general instability in this robust economy
and thriving democracy.
After the results were
in, the pan-blue ticket's presidential and
vice-presidential candidates, Lien Chan and James Soong
respectively, could be seen pouting on the street in a
silent cross-legged protest all night Saturday. The next
day they could be found leading a rally of thousands of
their supporters in the front of the Presidential
Palace, calling the election unfair because of the four
"bullets". Their supporters smashed windows and tried to
force their way into the district attorney's office,
demanding a recount.
On Monday morning, the
financial markets in Taipei had plunged to their 7
percent daily trading limit, and stayed there for the
rest of the trading session. The streets were still
clogged with angry protesters spurred on by their
leaders' demands for a recount, and KMT and PFP
legislators were leading stormy protests in front of the
courts.
The first bullet: The 'real'
one The crowd had begun to thin at the pan-blue
election headquarters Saturday night. Official vote
totals were stable, placing Chen and his Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP) ahead by around 30,000 votes,
and it looked as if the-blues had lost yet again. Only
the most diehard remained under the light rain that had
begun to fall as the master of ceremonies tried to lift
spirits with talk about how close the race was, how far
they had come, and how everyone ought to be proud of the
cooperation between the joint-ticket parties. Some guy
waved a giant yellow flag from the defunct
pro-unification New Party and cursed Chen at the top of
his lungs.
Lien and Soong arrived just after
8pm. Grave. Solemn. "We need to be calm. We need to be
rational," Lien said after a prolonged hesitation, like
some eerie silence of time stopping, preparing for a
divergence from all that was to all that will be. "There
is too much suspicion about the shooting ... We don't
know anything about it, and they still have not caught
the culprits. It goes without saying that the shooting
had an influence on this election," Lien said and
paused. "This is an unfair election! The vote is invalid
and we will sue!"
Speculation on the
assassination attempt began the night of the shooting,
with independent legislator Sissy Chen calling it a hoax
set up by the DPP in order to win a sympathy vote
(television news crews at the airport later saw her
leaving the country). The blues were soon accusing Chen
of hiring someone to shoot him, and demanding an
investigation committee be set up to get to the bottom
of their suspicions. Not only did they not demand the
election be postponed, but the blues actually requested
that it continue as scheduled.
KMT legislator
Bill Wu, who is one of the pan-blue whips for protesting
the election, told me that the impact of the shooting
tipped the scales in Chen's favor and that the election
should have been suspended (he seemed to be unaware that
the election committee had announced before the election
that it could not legally postpone the election). "We
had studied possible stunts that the DPP might do - a
collapse of independence leader Lee Tung-hui, a sickness
of Madame Chen Shui-bian - but we never imagined that
they would do something like this," he said.
Before the shooting, Wu said, KMT internal polls
put the blues winning the election by 700,000 votes, or
6-7 percent. DPP legislator Shen Fu-hsiung said half a
million votes switched sides because of the shooting.
The empty bullet: The referendum Shen
calls the referendum the "empty bullet" because it did
not pass due to a lack of voter turnout but it - asking
about defense against targeted Chinese missiles - was
used to help Chen win the election. "The referendum
worked for us," Shen said point blank. "I am honest with
you ... Chen used the referendum issue to
combine/consolidate his supporters."
Coupled
with the presidential vote and held on the same day was
a referendum on two issues: whether Taiwan should
continue to arm itself against China's missile threat,
and whether or not to begin a dialogue with Beijing.
Prior to their loss on Saturday night, Lien and Soong
waged a legal campaign against the referendum, calling
it illegal and urging their supporters not to vote for
it. To be valid, the referendum needed 50 percent of all
eligible voters - about 8.25 million out of about 16.5
million registered. Only 45 percent of Taiwan's
registered voters picked up their referendum ballots.
Those who did vote overwhelmingly opposed
China's missile buildup and called for talks between the
two sides.
In his Saturday night tirade against
the election results, Lien took to calling the
referendum an unfair election tactic, giving him further
grounds on which to refuse to accept the election
results, although he did not make such a fuss prior to
his loss.
The misfired bullet: Invalid
ballots Some 330,000 invalid ballots were cast in
this election, about 2.5 percent of the total vote.
Compare to 0.2 percent in the last presidential election
four years ago, and the loser finds another issue to
arouse suspicion.
"Chen Shui-bian is a cheater!"
cried Soong when his turn came to speak at the Saturday
night rally. He said there were too many invalid ballots
not to suspect something, and the crowd cheered and
blasted their air horns. The next day at the pan-blue
protest in front of the presidential palace, the same
cries could be heard. Signs had been made overnight
calling Chen a cheater. "A-Bian, shame on you," was a
typical chant.
The blues filed accusations at
the Kaohsiung district prosecutors' office on Sunday
over claims by a voter that "some" of the ballots
improperly marked for Chen were counted, while those
improperly marked for Lien were not. "There are many
rumors coming in from all over about wrongdoing," KMT
legislator Bill Wu told me Sunday morning. Do any of
those rumors have legal grounds on which to recount or
recall the election? "There are just way too many
invalid votes. There is some hanky-panky going on here,"
he said.
In their defiant non-concession speech,
Lien and Soong did not come forth with any real grounds
of fraud or wrongdoing. They cloaked themselves in the
rhetoric of "unfairness" and the "cheating" DPP, and
raised a number of suspicions, which have yet to be
confirmed, and which are harder to fathom from the
outside because the vote-counting process is open, with
numerous representatives from all parties present.
Former head of the Taipei City Labor Bureau
Zheng Wenqi does have some answers, however. Angry with
the nation's politicians and absolutely disillusioned
with the political process, he led a movement to cast
invalid ballots, called the Invalid Ballot Alliance. "I
put a stamp across all four of their mouths so they
would shut up!" he said, referring to the ballot which
pictured all four candidates main candidates.
The alliance is a union of social activists and
labor-rights groups advocating for the disadvantaged;
the alliance encouraged voters deliberately to cast
invalid ballots. The idea: to protest the domination of
politics by well-funded political parties and the fact
that both the presidential candidates were relatively
wealthy men.
His campaign won the support of
many of the island's youth who have become disappointed
with the DPP after four years, and repelled by the
negative campaigning of Lien and Soong. One university
student, for example, made the six-hour trip home to
Pingdung from Taipei just to cast an invalid ballot and
"show his frustration with Taiwan politics".
DPP
legislator Shen Fu-hsiung said most of the invalid
ballots were cast by people who would have leaned toward
the pan-blue camp. Breakdowns show that counties with
higher concentrations of blue supporters cast more
invalid ballots.
The silver bullet:
Money The fourth bullet that helped win the
election for Chen, Shen calls the silver bullet. "I am
not here to deny anything," he said frankly, "but we
probably used pork-barreling rather than directly
distributing the money."
This traditionally has
been a KMT tactic (which is probably why the blues
failed to level accusations). In the past the KMT used
its connections, influence, and central government
authority to give out lucrative contracts to local
companies in exchange for their mobilizing votes. They
would further draw on the party's huge financial stock
piles to buy votes directly - paying cash to people for
a pan-blue vote.
With the DPP in control of the
central government, however, and the KMT having been
forced to begin selling off its assets, the party's
system of vote-getting broke down in this election. It
was unable to offer contracts and unable to rely on its
networks to deliver cash for votes.
The DPP,
however, did excel in such vote-getting, according to
Shen. The tremendous win in the south indicates that the
DPP machine is working. In some southern counties, the
DPP won by more than 60 percent, and it won Taichung
County for the first time.
Grounds for a
recount? As this was written on Monday, pan-blue
supporters still clogged the street in front of the
presidential palace. The rioters in the center of the
island had mostly dispersed peacefully, leaving only a
few broken windows and smashed-up cars. But still, the
image of Lien and Soong standing on a platform leading a
responsive, enraged crowd, incessantly sounding air
horns and yelling, gave the impression of an angry riot,
rather than presidential candidates contesting an
election.
Their defeated pan-blue message is as
follows: "There is too much doubt about the shooting.
The bundling of the referendum with the presidential
election is unfair. They cheated on the ballots."
Therefore, "We demand a recount."
"How can we
trust them?" asked Lien Chan on stage Sunday afternoon
in front of his flag-waving, horn-blaring supporters.
"If our leaders are lying and cheating, then we won't
accept them," yelled Soong. "They have unlawfully taken
power through unfair means."
The problem is that
beyond the whining and name calling, they have little
evidence to back up their claims, only suspicions, which
do not constitute legal grounds for a recount. As the
blues' cries sound more and more like calls for
government upheaval, rather than fair recount, the wider
society has begun to view them as an annoyance. Already,
TV commentators have begun to cast doubt on the motives
of Lien and Soong, saying they will not admit defeat,
otherwise their political careers are over. And some
political analysts here are predicting the demise of the
KMT because of this debacle.
It is true that the
courts demanded all the ballot boxes sealed, but it
seems more an immediate gesture to pacify the mobs, and
no recount has yet been scheduled. It remains to be seen
if this will calm the blues, or if they even have legal
grounds for a recount.
"We Americans know what
an illegitimate election is," said James Seymour, senior
research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
at Columbia University, referring to the 2000 US
presidential election. "And this is not it."
Macabe Keliher is an independent
historian and journalist, and a regular contributor to
Asia Times Online. His website is www.macabe.net.
(Copyright
2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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