Taiwan, and president, take a
drubbing By Ting-I Tsai
TAIPEI - The Kuomintang (KMT) party won an
unexpected landslide victory in Taiwan's
legislative election at the weekend, giving this
opposition party a major boost ahead of March's
presidential election and forcing President Chen
Shui-bian to accept his lame-duck status.
Benefiting from its decades-old control of
factions at local levels and a new legislative
election system, the KMT won 81 out of the 113
seats at stake, compared with the ruling
Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) 27. The
remaining five seats went to independent
candidates, most of whom are KMT allies.
Chen's casting of the KMT as puppets of
China failed to energize
his
DPP base or independent voters, while the KMT
successfully turned the polls into a no-confidence
vote against the president, who overexposed
himself during the campaign, political analysts
suggest.
Chen, who expressed confidence he
would help the party win 50 seats, acknowledged
the poor showing and immediately resigned as DPP
chairman. That role will be taken over by the
party's presidential candidate, Frank Hsieh, who
was criticized in some quarters for not stumping
actively enough for the DPP's legislative
candidates. He immediately kicked off his
presidential campaign by holding a major campaign
rally in Kaohsiung on Sunday evening.
The
DPP's defeat, said Hsu Yung-ming, professor of
political science at Soochow University, was "a
consequence of the DPP losing touch with the
voters".
Tsai Huang-liang, a newly elected
DPP legislator, argued, "The DPP needs to find the
reason for its failure. Otherwise I don't think we
have any chance in the presidential election in
March."
After suffering a narrow defeat in
the 2004 legislative polls, the DPP had realized
the futility of trying to win a legislative
majority and had set a more modest target of
winning 45-50 seats in the restructured lawmaking
body. Convinced that the KMT's strength at the
grassroots level remained too strong to overcome,
the DPP chose to use the legislative election to
pave the way for the presidential vote and the
controversial referendum over Taiwan's United
Nations bid, Hsu argued.
But nobody
foresaw such an overwhelming defeat.
Putting the best face possible on their
party's drubbing, DPP spokesmen reminded observers
that the 38.17% of the votes its party's
candidates received in Saturday's electoral
district races surpassed the 35.72% they received
in the 2004 legislative elections. But while such
a vote total was good enough to garner two-fifths
of the legislature's seats in 2004, when Taiwan
still had multi-representative districts, it only
earned one-fourth of the seats this time around.
The DPP now hopes to turn KMT dominance in
the legislature to its advantage in the
presidential campaign by selling voters on the
idea that KMT control of both the executive and
legislative branches would be disastrous, arguing
that it would mark a return of the party's
authoritarian rule that characterized its reign in
the second half of the 20th century.
"The
DPP's loss in the legislative election should help
stimulate a sense of crisis among its supporters
for the presidential election," Hsu said. "You can
see Frank Hsieh was saving his energy for his
post-legislative election campaign, but he now
needs to convince voters why Taiwan needs a DPP
president with such a huge KMT parliamentary
majority."
The KMT, meanwhile, reiterated
the importance of maintaining the momentum for
March's presidential election at a news conference
held shortly after the election results were
confirmed on Saturday. The KMT has lost the last
two presidential elections partly because of
overconfidence and lackluster campaigning brought
about by substantial early leads in opinion polls.
At the news conference, Ma Ying-jeou also
vowed to improve the cross-strait relationship
with China should he win the presidential
election.
The legislative election under
the new "single seat, dual vote" system was held
in conjunction with two referendums - one on
recovering the opposition Kuomintang's assets that
foes charge were improperly obtained during the
party's authoritarian rule, the other on cracking
down on government corruption.
Turnout for
the legislative election, marked by voter apathy
and confusion over the voting procedure, set a
record low at 58.5%, while the two referendums
also were rejected because only 26% of eligible
voters cast referendum ballots, far short of the
50% threshold needed for the votes to be valid.
Taiwan's imperfect political structure led
to attempts by both the DPP and the KMT to boost
their chances by manipulating issues unrelated to
the legislature. This maneuvering resulted in a
campaign devoid of substantive issues, dominated
instead by the removal of symbols of former
president Chiang Kai-shek and a dispute over the
voting procedure for the two referendums and
legislative election.
The new legislative
voting system resulted from the passing of a
constitutional amendment in 2005 that halved the
body's 225 seats and adopted a "single-seat, dual
vote" system similar to that used in Japan and
Germany. But the voting system, where voters cast
one ballot for a candidate and one for a political
party that determined the makeup of "at-large"
legislators, failed to live up to its billing as a
way to usher in an era of more professional and
efficient lawmakers.
Instead, the new
system rewarded local factional strength and
discounted professionalism even more than in the
past. With only one lawmaker being elected from
each district, having powerful local ties and
being able to get out the vote trumped the appeal
of being an effective lawmaker. Many of the
directly elected winners were local political
power brokers who now have more power than before
but care little about legislating effective
national policy.
"The next Parliament will
certainly be worse, because the newly elected
legislators will be lords of their districts who
are powerful enough to bargain with the central
government," said former DPP legislator and
Kaohsiung deputy mayor Chiu Tai-san.
KMT
secretary general Wu Den-yih, who himself won an
easy victory in an electoral district, echoed
Chiu's argument, saying the new system is a
democratic setback because historical problems
such as vote-buying and the emergence of
unprofessional legislators actually grew worse.
And that comes after a survey conducted by
the Taipei Society, a political watchdog composed
of a group of professors, that found the
rhetorical and violent behavior of 120 sitting
legislators - more than half - to be
unprofessional in 2006.
Looking to act as
an alternative to the rough-and-tumble world of a
political system dominated by two parties and
chaotic behavior, former president Lee Teng-hui
and former premier Tang Fei along with 10 fringe
parties urged the public to cast their party vote
for minority parties to help them win at-large
seats.
Lee had hoped that momentum for a
third force in local politics could lead to the
emergence of another presidential candidate in the
March 22 election. Tang, meanwhile, had launched a
campaign requesting legislative candidates to
guarantee full attendance, no violence, and no
political maneuvering should they be elected.
But their appeals for a third way to
counter partisan wrangling between the KMT and DPP
fell on deaf ears, with none of the small parties
gaining the 5% of the party vote needed to win
at-large seats.
The DPP legislative caucus
leader suggested that improving the quality of the
legislative body may require a complete overhaul
of the system.
"At the end of the day,
Taiwan needs to overcome all of the irrelevant
political issues, such as the issue of
'unification and independence', and draft a
complete constitutional amendment to create a
normal election mechanism," said DPP legislative
caucus whip Ker Chien-ming.
Ting-I
Tsai is a freelance journalist based in
Taipei.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
