The opposition parties' vicious presidential recall motion failed to muster the two-thirds support it needed in the legislature, and was nixed. The pan-blues' united efforts to recall President Chen Shui-bian (
That the recall motion would fail was a foregone conclusion. As anyone with any political common sense will tell you: Seeking a recall of a popularly elected president for political reasons, and in the absence of any evidence that the president broke the law, is unacceptable by any reasonable legislator's political and ethical standards.
Partisan politics should be defined as a healthy competition between political parties that espouse different political ideals. If a precedent is set that a popularly elected president can be ousted on purely political grounds, then such a phenomenon is bound to repeat itself, no matter who is president. That is, whichever party becomes the governing party, it is bound to face the same challenge, and a vicious cycle will ensue, with parties ceaselessly trying to unseat each other's presidents.
Needless to say, the pursuit of political stability and the development of a functional multi-party system will be hindered by such tactics, and ultimately, democracy will fade. This explains why, in a mature democratic nation, opposition parties cannot seek to recall the president in such a cavalier fashion.
Recalling the president also presents problems of a technical nature. US presidential elections, for example, are almost never landslides; the winner typically wins the White House with a thin majority of votes. That is, the US public is usually not overwhelmingly in favor of one candidate or the other, making any attempt to unseat the president an extremely risky venture.
As much as the US Democratic Party detests President George W. Bush's policies and views, they have never behaved like the Taiwanese opposition by trying to drum up support to unseat the commander-in-chief.
The US boasts a rich tradition of public dissent and assembly, but rallies organized by political parties are rare; non-governmental organizations are typically the organizers of such events. In the US, partisan politics is not encouraged to spill out onto the streets.
Why were the pan-blues determined to put the recall motion to a vote when they knew full well that it would fail? Why have they slapped this on the table at the expense of political stability and national interests?
The reason is that the modern Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has a long tradition of dictatorship, and has not adapted to operating within a democratic environment of healthy competition between parties.
Ever since it became an opposition party, the KMT has done little but whine. Their stoking of people's emotions and prejudices and calling on supporters to participate in a signature drive to seek Chen's ouster all reek of Chinese Communist Party-style tactics: Recall how China's Cultural Revolution began.
Black-clad gangsters attended recent KMT-led rallies in droves. The KMT is notorious for its close connections with gangs: Recall the 1984 slaying in California of writer Henry Liu (
The party is calling on its gangster brethren once again: This time, to intimidate the ruling party. Fortunately, Taiwan has already made the leap to democracy, and the ghosts of Chiang Kai-shek (
Cao Changqing is a freelance journalist based in the US.
Translated by Daniel Cheng
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