TAIPEI - Taiwan's Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP) suffered a surprise upset on
Saturday when it and its allies failed to win the
majority of legislative seats that had been widely
predicted. The DPP and its smaller ally, the Taiwan
Solidarity Union (TSU), managed to win 101 of the total
225 seats up for grabs, while the opposition pan-blue
alliance of the Kuomintang (KMT), People First Party
(PFP) and New Party won 114. The non-partisan Solidarity
Union, a group of independents registered as a party,
won six seats, while non-affiliated independents won the
remaining four. Since the majority of independents are
likely to vote with the pan-blues (blue after the color
of the KMT emblem), this means that President Chen
Shui-bian is destined to spend most of the rest of his
second term wrestling with the problems of minority
government.
The election has been widely
trumpeted as both a victory for the pan-blues and a
rejection of the strong line Chen was taking on issues
related to Taiwan independence during the election
campaign. Media around the world have rushed to call
defeat for Chen, victory for China. Actually, the
election is far more nuanced than this.
For a
start, the pan-blue victory is only a victory in terms
of surpassing expectations. They were expected to do
badly, but did not do as badly as was expected. In terms
of seats, the new legislature, which convenes on
February 1, will be almost identical to the old one. At
the last legislative election in 2001, the DPP won 87
seats and the TSU won 13 for a total of 100. This time
around, the DPP won 89 seat and the TSU won 12 for a
total of 101. A gain of one seat is hardly outright
rejection.
The pan-blues too are collectively
almost exactly where they were in 2001. Then - including
the New Party's one seat - they won 115 seats. On
Saturday they won 114. So little change there either.
Given that basically nothing has changed, why then is
the election presented as a singular defeat for the
pan-greens (green after the color of the DPP-emblem)?
Simply because they were expected to do a lot
better. After coming from being 20 points behind to
winning the presidential election in March by a mere
30,000 votes, the pan-greens were expected to be able to
keep this momentum in the legislative election and gain
a majority of seats. And they certainly had a lot going
for them. People were fed up with the legislative
gridlock that has been a feature of Taiwan since 2000,
with the pan-blues simply refusing to pass the
legislation that President Chen's government initiated.
They were also disgusted with the behavior of the
pan-blues after the presidential election in which, in
their refusal to accept the election result, they tried
to plunge the country into chaos and revealed a rather
unpleasant contempt for both the democratic and the
legal process. Given the pan-blues' behavior, they
should have suffered at the polls. Why didn't they?
The pan-greens were
over-ambitious Taiwan has a curious electoral
system in which while voters only have one vote,
electoral districts have multiple seats. For example, in
the single constituency of Taipei city's southern
district, there were 30 candidates for 10 legislative
seats among an electorate of about 1 million. On
election day voters cast their vote for the candidate of
their choice, the totals are tallied and the top 10
vote-getters win seats.
Such a system puts
candidates from the same party in competition with one
another - they all want votes from the same pool. For
parties, there are two main problems with this. First,
they have to have a shrewd idea of how many votes from
the poll they might win overall and select an
appropriate number of candidates. Then they must try to
make sure that popular vote-getters do not take votes
unnecessarily from their less popular fellow candidates.
They want to spread the vote evenly over all their
candidates in the hope of electing as many as possible.
The pan-greens worked out a
complicated vote-sharing strategy that worked well enough in
most places. The problem was that they simply had too
many candidates - and too few voters. As a result, their
vote was spread too thin in many cases to be able to
provide each candidate in the allocation system with
enough votes to be able to win a seat. In almost
every constituency, the ranks of these who just failed to
win places - for a 10-seat district, for example, places
11 to 13 in the list of vote-winners - were dominated
by pan-greens. To put this in perspective, the
pan-greens had 122 candidates and received 4.23 million
votes (34,600 votes received per candidate run), while the
pan-blues ran 116 candidates and garnered 4.55 million votes
(39,250 votes for every candidate run). In an election
system where the threshold for election is thought to be
about 45,000 votes, the thinness of the pan-greens'
support is obvious.
All elections are
local So why was that support thin? It
wasn't just too many candidates, it was also too few
votes. Total pan-green votes were 2.25 million fewer than
in the presidential election in March. This means that
one in three people who turned out to vote for
Chen Shui-bian in March this time stayed at home. Such people did
not, it should be noted, switch their votes to the
opposition. The pan-blues also failed to gain as many
votes as they had done at the presidential election;
their totals were down by 2 million. One thing widely
noted on election night was the unusually low turnout -
just 59.16% compared with 66.2% in 2001 and 68.1% in
1998.
The reason for the shortage of pan-green
voters has to be laid at the door of Chen Shui-bian
himself. As was pointed out in Asia Times Online last
week, the DPP ran an extraordinary campaign, in utter
defiance of all that conventional wisdom and bitterly
learned experience would dictate. The DPP knew full well
that Taiwan independence themes do not play well in
legislative elections, having learned this the hard way
in 1995 and 1998. Yet Chen went ahead with a campaign
that barely addressed bread-and-butter issues and
focused almost exclusively on issues involving national
identity and constitutional change. It is possible that
Chen, who has a rather high level of conceit, thought
that his charisma could simply change the nature of the
legislative election experience, that he could take a
campaign successfully into areas that previously had
been far from fruitful. If so, he got a sharp correction
on Saturday night.
Taiwanese legislative
elections are almost exclusively pork-barrel affairs.
The question any voter asks of a candidate is not "what
do you stand for?" but "what can you get for me?" The
pan-greens' campaigns simply did not address this issue.
For the TSU, a Taiwan independence party, this did not
matter. But for the DPP, it was a huge handicap. Outside
of the main cities what voters wanted to hear was
something about subsidies if they were farmers, pensions
if they were old, free schoolbooks if they were parents,
direct links with China if they were businessmen. What
they got instead was constitutional reform, (all the
more absurd in that such reform could not be conducted
without pan-blue support) and the importance of changing
the names of Taiwan's diplomatic missions. How did the
DPP ever imagine that such a strategy of noise over
substance was going to work?
The pan-blues, on
the other hand, ran a totally shambolic campaign at the
central level which, ironically, paid off quite well at
the local one. The KMT candidates in particular, knowing
that they could expect little help from party
headquarters, were forced to do what the KMT has always
done well, work via local networks and personal
relationships at the grassroots. The KMT's long history
of patron-client politics means that at the local,
pork-barrel level it has a better history of being able
to give the people what they want. The irony of watching
KMT Chairman Lien Chan give his victory speeches over
the weekend is that it was the resourcefulness of his
candidates and the strength of grassroots'
organizational ability in the face of Lien's abject
hopelessness that pulled the KMT
through.
Problems of incumbency Another
problem faced by the DPP in particular was that so many
of their political talents have been drafted into the
government - in Taiwan you cannot serve both as a
government official and a legislator - that many of
their candidates were relatively new, untested and
inexperienced.
Who really lost? To
reiterate, this was not so much a pan-green defeat as a
case of their not doing as well as expected. The
position of the two camps after February 1 will be
virtually identical to how it has been for the last
three years. Within the pan-blue camp itself, though,
the picture is very different. In 2001 the KMT took 68
seats to the PFP's 46. On Saturday the KMT won 79 while
the PFP took 34. So it is in the pan-blue camp itself
that the balance of power has really changed. The KMT's
gains were not made from the pan-greens but from the
PFP. Already PFP chairman James Soong has railed against
what he sees as KMT perfidy in the election campaign,
accusing his "ally" of deliberately attempting to steal
voters from the PFP by using its organizational
advantage at the grassroots to interfere with PFP
campaigning. The merger that was planned between the two
parties, scheduled to take place some time in February,
is now off for good, Soong says.
China What makes the PFP's poor
performance interesting is that it is far more pro-China
than the KMT. The KMT has a strong localization faction
that differs little ideologically from moderates in the
DPP. Soong had made a purge of this element of the KMT
the price for bringing his PFP back into the KMT fold.
After Saturday the KMT no longer has to pay attention.
All this makes the real role that sentiment
toward China played in the election rather less obvious
than is generally thought to be the case. The DPP's
campaign failed, not necessarily because it made people
nervous about China's reaction to a DPP government with
legislative power - though obviously some voters must
have been put off by this - but because Chen Shui-bian
chose to run a presidential campaign for legislative
elections, whereas Taiwan's short democratic experience
should have taught him that there was a vast difference
between the two.
And while it is true that the
pro-China parties did better than expected, it is
noticeable that the more emphatically pro-China of the
two lost heavily to its pro-status quo "ally".
It will be interesting to see China's reaction
in the months to come. For Beijing's main concern that
Taiwan independence had an unstoppable momentum must be
slightly eased by the election results. What it needs to
do is show that it can engage creatively with Taiwan as
the independence movement is hobbled.
This,
ironically, means overcoming its distaste for Chen
Shui-bian, dropping its demand for Taiwan's acceptance
of the "one China principle" as a precondition for
negotiation - something even the KMT cannot accept - and
taking Chen up on the offer of letting private
organizations negotiate direct links in the manner of
the Taiwan Hong Kong air-links agreement. This would be
looked on with favor in Taiwan. And with Chen now
seeming like a lame duck, and with no national election
for another three years, Beijing should not have to fear
boosting Chen's or the DPP's popularity.
Laurence Eyton is deputy
editor-in-chief of the Taipei Times. He has worked in
Taiwan for 18 years.
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