TAIPEI
- Whatever happens in Saturday's elections for the
legislative Yuan, the outcome will be a watershed for
Taiwan's politics, and each side will have to mobilize
its core supporters. A victory for the governing
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will inevitably
ratchet up tensions with China and strengthen Taipei's
hand, since its past initiatives have been blocked by
the opposition majority of lawmakers. An opposition
victory probably will mean stasis.
A closer
look: unlike Taiwan's governing pan-greens, dominated by
the DPP to the virtual exclusion of its lesser partner,
the opposition pan-blues, desperately trying to cling to
their legislative majority in legislative elections on
Saturday, are split more evenly. All seats are up for
grabs. In the last elections in 2001, the opposition
Kuomintang (KMT) won 68 seats in the 225-seat
legislature, while the People First Party (PFP) won 46.
As a result, there is more of a balance between the two
parties in the opposition.
Given Taiwan's
unusual single-vote, multiple-member electoral system,
in which allies must compete for votes from the same
vote pool, for two roughly evenly sized parties to
maximize the number of seats they win requires an
extraordinarily high degree of organization and an awful
lot of goodwill. The problem for the pan-blues is that
both of these commodities are in extremely short supply.
The reasons for this lie in the Machiavellian
machinations of former president Lee Teng-hui. Lee spent
12 years as chairman of the pro-unification KMT; that he
is now the figurehead of the Taiwan Solidarity Union,
the most extreme pro-Taiwan independence party, displays
a career arc that defies analysis. During this time he
first fostered, then tried to destroy the career of
James Soong, the current chairman of the PFP. One of
Taiwan's unexplained political mysteries is why Lee had
no sooner invested great political capital in elevating
Soong, than he spent even more capital casting him down,
even to the extent of conducting a set of constitutional
revisions to get rid of Soong's job. In the meantime Lee
lighted upon Lien Chan, currently chairman of the KMT,
promoted him first to be premier then to be his running
mate in the presidential election in 1996.
The
result of this was a rift between Lee's possible heirs
and their followers and eventually a split in the KMT
itself. At the time of the selection of the KMT's
presidential candidate in 1999, there is no doubt that
Soong was by far the more capable of the two men.
Nevertheless, Lee threw his almost autocratic control of
the party behind Lien's candidacy. This was due partly
to his personal animosity toward Soong, partly because
Soong has an ugly history during the later martial law
era as a leading figure both in suppressing dissidents
and in organizing a vigorous campaign against the use of
the Taiwanese dialect; he also was considered by many to
be an apologist for a number of KMT-arranged murders,
and generated some antipathy because he was a
mainlander. Lee saw Soong as simply inappropriate as the
leader of a democratic Taiwan.
The problem,
however, with Lien was that he was a lifetime bureaucrat
from an extremely rich family. Utterly devoid of
charisma, Lien lacked the common touch needed to relate
to voters in Taiwan's rural south. And while he was
counted as a Taiwanese, his father was a
ban-shan, a Taiwanese who had gone to work in
China during the Japanese area. Lien Chan himself was
born in Xi'an, China and had returned with the KMT, high
in the party's esteem but seen by fellow Taiwanese as a
collaborator with the mainlander dictatorship. Lien's
attempt to play the part of a local boy has never
carried conviction.
The decision to choose Lien
as the KMT's presidential candidate in 1999 led to
Soong's decision to run in the election as an
independent, for which he was thrown out of the KMT.
While the anti-DPP vote amounted to 60% of the total, it
was split two ways with 36% going to Soong, and 24%
going to Lien, leaving Chen to find himself in the
presidential office despite the fact that the majority
of voters had cast ballots against him. The KMT's loss
of power also cost Lee Teng-hui his job, to which Lien,
despite his trouncing at the polls, succeeded.
After the election Soong set up the PFP, and the
story of the pan-blues (named after the color of the KMT
emblem) ever since has been how, recognizing that
splitting their support has been disastrous, could they
learn to work together.
Lien and Soong managed
to put heir personal animosity to one side to run on a
shared ticket in the presidential election this past
March. Nevertheless, it took a lot of negotiation to
bring this about, in particular to persuade Soong to be
Lien's running mate. Since the election there has been
simmering resentment from the PFP that had the ticket
been Soong-Lien instead of Lien-Soong they would have
won handsomely.
There has also been a movement
to reunite the two parties, which has so far produced
little more than acrimony. Soong won't unite his PFP
with the KMT unless the KMT purges itself of its
pro-independence elements - basically Taiwanese cadres
still loyal to the weak Taiwan nationalism espoused by
Lee Teng-hui during his chairmanship.
Soong
wants the KMT to become a bastion of reunification.
Currently it is a broad church, with Lien and the
leadership clique espousing reunification, while the
lower ranks ponder party reform that would reject the
old commitment to unification and "one China", and even
would contemplate changing the name of the party to the
Taiwan Nationalist Party.
These
"pro-localization" forces loathe Soong both for his
ideology and because they consider him directly
responsible for the party's loss of power. They also
look at the overwhelmingly mainlander PFP and see it as
a niche party, which without the KMT's support base
among the native Hoklo and Hakka Taiwanese, would be
politically marginalized. As a result they do not take
kindly to what they see as the PFP tail trying to wag
the KMT dog.
For their part, the PFP consider
themselves to be the "real KMT" and look on their
erstwhile allies as ideologically unsound and probable
traitors. As some say, they prefer Taiwan to be ruled by
China than by the Taiwanese. But the majority of the KMT
these days are Taiwanese.
Not surprising, plans
to have a joint pan-blue campaign have been fraught from
the start. Taiwan's anachronistic multi-member electoral
district system pits candidates from the same or allied
parties against each other. As a result, candidate
selection needs fine judgment. Select a few and though
they might all win seats you have too small a power
base. Select too many and they cannibalize each other's
support so that in the end everyone looses. On top of
the judgment as to how many candidates in each
constituency to field, the way to maximize seats won is
to direct supporters as to how to spread their votes
evenly over the field - what are known as vote
allocation strategies. Without a vote allocation
strategy, a popular candidate will get far more votes
than he or she needs to win, thus depriving less popular
allies of the votes they need to win a seat.
Working out a vote-allocation strategy for a
single party requires a realistic appraisal of the
party's ability to win votes in a specific constituency,
it needs an agreement on the part of the candidates to
campaign as a team rather than to try to maximize their
personal vote tally, and it needs the voters to be well
informed in advance of the strategy so they know who to
vote for. For two parties working together there is the
added difficulty of reaching an agreement on how much of
the pie to give away to one's ally, as well an early
consensus about each other's prospective candidates.
Among the pan-blues all of these factors have so
far been utterly lacking, and earlier this week the KMT
finally announced that it would not coordinate a
strategy with the PFP. The reaction of the pundits on
Taiwan's interminable political talk shows was
interesting. Green pundits (pan-greens after the color
of the DPP emblem) were wondering whether to open the
champagne now, blue pundits were furious with Lien Chan
for damaging both parties' chances.
But it isn't
just a vote-allocation strategy that the pan-blues have
been lacking - it is any coherent campaign theme. Their
control of the legislature has resulted in government
paralysis with which most voters are heartily sick. Yet
all the pan-blues can offer is more of the same,
presenting this vacuum as a desirable end in itself.
Many voters, including pan-blues, were disgusted
by the mayhem that Lien and Soong incited after the
presidential election in March and are contemptuous of
the pan-blues' attempts to get the election annulled in
the courts without being able to resent a shred of
coherent evidence as to what this should happen. In the
legislative campaign this quest has been presented as
one seeking justice; many voters see it as Lien Chan
refusing to accept the reality that he is not wanted as
president.
Other elements of the pan-blue
campaign are even more strange. Lien has challenged Chen
and the DPP to hold a referendum on independence "if he
has the guts" despite the fact that nobody in Taiwan
wants such a referendum and it is actually against the
referendum law which is one of the few pieces of
legislation the pan-blues have actually passed. And
there have been attacks on the DPP for such things as
siphoning off government assets to the party and using
government facilities for its campaigning. No evidence
has been presented that the DPP has in fact done any of
this, but it does remind voters that this kind of
behavior was par for the course during the KMT's 50-year
rule.
Many KMT candidates have virtually
disowned their party, and are running on their personal
record and local reputation. Lien is simply not wanted
at campaign rallies. As for the PFP, its campaign seems
to have vanished, partly as a result of the party's
poverty. It had hoped that the KMT would open its
previously well-filled coffers to help its ally, but the
KMT is now rather mysteriously claiming a shortage of
money; its own party employees waited until the end of
November before receiving their October paychecks.
That the pan-blue campaign is vacuous in content
and utterly shambolic in organization should mean that
the DPP's dream of a pan-green legislative majority is
assured. But this author speculated in the first of
these articles that the DPP has assumed a far more
radical election strategy than a prudent one, one that
past experience would dictate because polls suggest that
moderating one's pitch to capture the middle ground is
pointless because there is no middle ground. Taiwan is
simply split in two, and victory will go to whoever can
better mobilize their core support. In this light the
pan-blue campaign shambles might not matter. Pan-blue
supporters will still go out to vote, out of a visceral
hatred of Chen Shui-bian. What will make a difference,
though, is the breakdown of cooperation on vote
allocation. Without some kind of a deal the pan-blues
will suffer, and it seems highly unlikely that one can
be cobbled together literally at the 11th hour.
Whatever happens, Saturday's election will be a
watershed. A pan-green majority will give the greens the
power they want to vigorously pursue their
nation-building agenda, which hitherto has been stalled
by the pan-blue control of the legislature. This will
inevitably ratchet up tensions with China, perhaps
seriously. Meanwhile, the pan-blues will find the KMT
stripped of its - stolen - party assets, and riven by
enmity between its native Taiwanese and mainlander
factions. The PFP, the significance of which, given its
lack of a broad party organization, depends entirely on
how many seats it wins, will support the mainlanders,
which might lead to yet another split in the KMT as the
Taiwanese walk out to form their own nationalist party.
On the other hand, a pan-blue victory promises
something like stasis. Rather like the Western Front in
1916; each side will be unable to shift the other in any
strategically important way, they will merely resort to
bombarding each other's positions, only here with their
rhetoric, because of their overall strategic impotence.
But this will mean an already shrill environment
will get even more so. And the energy that the greens
have so far put into their nation-building agenda might
look for a target on which to vent its frustration. So
far the ethnic violence that has always been a
possibility but has never actually materialized, would
find such an environment perfect in which to germinate.
Laurence Eyton is deputy
editor-in-chief of the Taipei Times. He has worked in
Taiwan for 18 years.
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