Taiwan elections curiouser and
curiouser By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Taiwan's elections just keep getting
weirder. With voting in legislative elections scheduled
for Saturday, and the campaign in its last week, it is
time to take stock of what has been a decidedly odd
campaign. What has made it so is that the two main
political blocs, the governing "pan-green" Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP) (pan-green after the color of
the DPP emblem) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU),
has espoused a campaign platform exactly the opposite of
what conventional wisdom, based on past successes and
failures, would advise. That is, they are talking up
independence-type issues and constitutional reform,
though the DPP is not calling for outright independence
of the self-governing island.
Meanwhile the
opposition "pan-blue" camp of the Kuomintang (KMT)
(pan-blue after the color of the KMT emblem) and the
People First Party (PFP), appears to have disintegrated
around a perceived stinginess with cash, and more
importantly, the PFP's insistence that the KMT follow a
political line that many of its legislative candidates
dislike and most of which see as electoral suicide.
The strangeness of the campaign makes predicting
the election outcome rather more of a gamble than some
pundits seem to think. First, a look at the DPP
which, with more than six times the number of seats of
the TSU, is far and away the senior partner of the
pan-green alliance, and its campaign strategy, which
seems to fly in the face of a decade of hard-won
experience.
In the early 1990s the DPP made a
serious mistake. From the party's founding in the
mid-1980s until that time, it had advocated Taiwan's
formal independence from China. But this was interpreted
locally as Taiwan's independence from the Republic of
China, ie, the gang of mainlander exiles who had run
Taiwan as their personal fiefdom since Chiang Kai-shek's
flight from the mainland in 1949 and who had locked
themselves in office until China was "recovered" from
the communists.
"Independence" was, therefore,
seen by many not as related to Taiwan's relationship
with China across the Taiwan Strait, but rather as a
code for restoring political rights to the Taiwanese
majority and holding democratic elections for
national-level political positions and institutions.
"Independence" really meant majority rule.
By
1992, the battle for majority rule was won and
democratization was in full swing. The DPP, looking for
a new reason for being, then chose to make the seeking
of de jure independence for Taiwan the basis of the
party's platform.
But with majority rule a
reality, independence no longer was a code word for
political rights for the Taiwanese, but rather a portent
of trouble with China, a factor that the KMT took every
opportunity to stress. Predictably the DPP suffered.
Chen Shui-bian, Taiwan's president since 2000, captured
the Taipei City mayorship in 1994 - admittedly against a
split opposition vote - giving some hope that the DPP
was on a roll. But legislative elections in 1995 were a
bitter disappointment. And while the DPP performed
extremely well in local elections in 1997, its
performance was disappointing in legislative elections
in 1998. The message came through loud and clear that
while many voters preferred the clean DPP to the highly
corrupt KMT in local government, nevertheless they did
not trust the DPP with real power at the national level.
And the reason for this was quite plain - the DPP's
commitment to independence.
Since 1998 the DPP
has, therefore, been running away from its independence
stance, first sidelining it and then simply abolishing
it. This does not mean that the party has embraced
reunification with China. Rather it claims that Taiwan,
or the "Republic of China" is already an independent
country under international law - whether the rest of
the world recognizes this or not - and therefore to
"seek" independence is meaningless.
Once again
there has been a subtext for voters here, namely that
the DPP saw no reason to change the status quo - which
is overwhelmingly the preference of most Taiwanese.
Chen Shui-bian's presidential election victory
in 2000 - once again - had everything to do with a split
opposition vote and little to do with the DPP's new
pragmatism on independence. But there is no doubt that
the DDP's triumph in legislative elections in 2001, and
Chen's re-election victory against a united opposition
in March this year were fueled by voters' new trust in
the DPP not to do anything foolish.
Meanwhile,
the KMT had shifted from being the party of the status
quo, which it had been through the 1990s, to a party of
what could only be called paleo-nationalism, in which
the iconography of the days of martial law and the
one-party state was dusted off and presented as
something inspiriting nostalgia. The party leadership
had become stridently unificationist and had been
getting far too cozy with Beijing, which its officials
frequently visited.
If Chen won power by
accident in 2000, he quickly proved that he was to be
trusted, and he and his party soon reaped rewards.
But measured against this considerable
behind-the-scenes story and history, the DPP campaign
this year is looking decidedly odd.
The problem
the pan-greens must overcome is that throughout Chen's
presidency, the pan-blues have controlled the
legislature. While the 2001 election made the DPP the
biggest party, it nevertheless gave the combined
pan-blues a paper-thin overall majority, which has
proved extraordinarily resilient despite the DPP's
efforts to wean away the considerable number of KMT
legislators disillusioned with their party's disastrous
leadership and pro-China leanings. The pan-blues have
used their majority to block almost everything the
government has tried to do. What could not be carried
out by executive order simply has not been done at all,
unless the blues have found a way to work it to their
advantage. Taiwan might have had an administration these
last four years, but not what is generally though of as
a government. It is essential, therefore, for the
pan-greens to win a majority of seats on Saturday if
Chen's second term is not to be wasted like his first.
The campaign designed to bring this about
started out normally enough, with a two-pronged strategy
that could have been very effective, but now we will
never know. Chen, the DPP's star, was to go around the
island giving uplifting speeches on the wonderful things
the pan-greens, finally having legislative power, were
going to do for Taiwan, while a cabal of senior DPP
figures such as Premier Yu Shyi-kun and Frank Hsieh, the
mayor of Kaohsiung, would travel the same circuit
attacking the pan-blues. The idea was to present the
president as a man of hope and leave the negative
campaigning to his underlings.
It started well
enough with Chen talking about all the important
legislation that was waiting to be passed but so far had
been held up by pan-blue obstructionism. This included a
state pension for senior citizens - a popular move that
the pan-blues wanted to keep for themselves - and a bill
to divest the KMT of the billions of dollars in state
assets it illegally transferred into its own pocket
during its 50 years of rule with impunity. The money,
Chen promised, would be used to provide free school
meals and textbooks. Truth commissions were promised for
old grievances, such as the 1947 massacre of Taiwanese
by KMT troops, and the many years of political
repression known as the "White Terror".
So far,
relatively uncontroversial. But then Chen went off the
rails. It started with his claiming that after the
presidential election in March and his razor's edge
victory, the pan-blues had tried to organize what he
called a "soft coup", trying to create a crisis of
confidence that would pressure the government to annul
the election results, by persuading large numbers of
senior military officers to call in sick.
It was
a bold claim and so far completely unsubstantiated,
despite Chen's claims of having irrefutable evidence.
The risk to his credibility was obvious, but while a
libel suit has been pending, the situation has been very
ineffectually exploited by the pan-blues.
Since
then Chen has concentrated his campaign almost
exclusively on the question of constitutional reform.
Taiwan's constitution was drawn up in China while the
KMT still governed there. Designed for a large country,
it is deemed far too complex for the government of a
small one. More importantly, particularly after its
frequent amendment over the last 14 years, it has become
unclear where the real power lies, both within the
executive itself and between the executive and the
legislature. Does Taiwan have a parliamentary system, in
which the dominant group in the legislature has real
executive power and the president is little more than a
figurehead, or does it have a presidential system in
which the president forms the cabinet and wields a veto
over wayward legislation? Right now it is a hotchpotch
between the two. Chen has long wanted to sort out this
mess - a mess to which the DPP has been a formidable
contributor during previous sessions of constitutional
amendment.
Constitutional change might not sound
like a topic to motivate people to go out and vote, but
the story gets even stranger. For Chen has wandered
further and further away from the practical issues of
the flaws in the current constitution and increasingly
dallied with issues that have previously spelled doom
for the DPP. He talks of rewriting the constitution
rather than revising it, a move China has said it would
take as tantamount to a declaration of independence, and
talk of which has worried Washington so much that State
Department spokesman Richard Boucher verbally rapped
Chen's knuckles at the end of November, reiterating the
US stance of opposing either side of the Taiwan Strait
doing anything to change the status quo.
And
while Chen has said that he would hold to his 2000
inaugural pledge not to change the country's name, he
has recently said that, nevertheless, for all practical
purposes - the names of "non-official" overseas missions
and state-owned enterprises, for example - the use of
"China" in names should be replaced with "Taiwan". (On
Tuesday the US said quite clearly that it also opposed
this move.)
The really odd thing about this is
that the pan-greens will certainly not win enough seats
in the legislature - a super-majority of 75% of
legislators is needed - to pass a motion for
constitutional change. Chen has said that the new
constitution will be approved by a referendum. But this
would still require a constitutional change to allow a
referendum on the constitution, so the problem of the
75% super-majority remains - a detail that hardly any
voters seem to realize and that the opposition has not
exploited.
Chen's strategy, therefore, appears
extremely odd in that it has centered around the kind of
Taiwan independence-oriented issues that in the past
have alienated voters - at the expense of China's
predictable anger and Washington's alarm - and on which,
in the end, he will probably not be able to redeem his
promises.
Add to this a determined campaign from
the DPP ally, the TSU, over changing Taiwan's formal
designation, and a row between greens and blues about
teaching more Taiwanese history in schools and removing
exam questions about China from civil service exams. The
greens have a campaign full of hot-button issues for the
party faithful but hardly very appealing to floating
voters.
What is going on? There has been little
discussion of the DPP's odd strategy and almost no
explanation. We do know that polls in mid-November
showed a lack of pep in the campaign and, therefore, a
decision was taken to try to fire up the party faithful
by appealing to issues closer to their heart. But what
of the floating voters? After all, aren't elections
supposed to be won in the middle? Certainly that is not
where the DPP's campaign is directed.
To
speculate a little, the answer might be found in US
President George W Bush's re-election last month. Bush
showed that you can win not by appealing to the center
but by better mobilizing your core support. This was
sensible enough because after four years of the deeply
polarizing Bush there wasn't much center left in the US
to win over.
Taiwan is in a similar situation.
After the ugly presidential election campaign and the
pan-blue-inspired chaos in its aftermath, there simply
isn't any middle ground. Anecdotally, this reporter has
not met a single person in Taiwan whose mind was not
made up about who to vote for long before the campaign
really kicked off. Chen isn't, therefore, afraid of
losing the center ground simply because, in Taiwan at
least, it doesn't exist. What he is aiming at is
mobilizing the "pale greens", who otherwise might not
bother to vote.
Laurence Eyton is
deputy editor in chief of Taipei Times. He has worked in
Taiwan for 18 years.
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