The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is in disarray. No other word can describe an organization that allowed Vice President Annette Lu (
But Lu's pilgrimage was innocuous compared with the release of Taichung Mayor Jason Hu's (
The use of this tactic by Chen and other senior DPP figures points to the desperation of people who have run out of ideas and given up trying to inspire Taiwanese to build a better country.
The DPP has also failed to learn the lesson of the previous legislative contest: Local elections, though not without cross-strait significance, are fought and won on domestic issues and local connections. Instead, voters have been treated to the same tired spectacle of senior DPP politicians parachuting into local constituencies and warning of a cross-strait apocalypse if the pan-blue camp wins. Such tactics will be rewarded with a lower voter turnout.
The sobering reality is that the DPP holds less than 10 percent of all township-level administrations and less than 20 percent of city and county council seats. In these contests, the DPP was always going to "lose" the election in the face of an enduring Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presence and local clan and other non-aligned interests; what was important for the DPP was to make inroads, yet there has been little apparent enthusiasm for taking up this essential task.
The KMT has a chance of gaining county-level governments in Taipei and Ilan counties and Chiayi City. The DPP's grim challenge is to retain these seats, though Miaoli County offers a freak opportunity. The DPP's biggest concern should be failing to place its young guns into the next level of administrative influence and losing a new generation of capable national leaders. A balance of losses in Taipei County, Taichung City, Nantou County and Pingtung County would be disastrous for morale and trigger party bloodletting.
The KMT and Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
The People First Party could suffer losses in council seats, echoing its steep decline in the legislative elections. The Taiwan Solidarity Union may stand to gain council seats over disaffection with the DPP, but this will be little other than symbolic.
The result of this sad state of affairs will be the KMT claiming a new mandate for its agenda of legislative obstruction all the way up to the next presidential election. Such is Taiwanese democracy: The price of punishing the slothful is empowering the vandal.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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