On Friday, a second legislative motion to recall President Chen Shui-bian (
The question is: What next?
Other than a genuine coup, only two strategies for forcing Chen from office have not been tried -- one is a nationwide strike and the other is a vote of no confidence against Premier Su Tseng-chang (
But Chen would not be the direct victim of either strategy. The victims of the former would be the economy and every worker, while the victims of the latter would be Su and the legislature -- pan-green and pan-blue lawmakers alike -- which would be dissolved prematurely if the president opted for fresh elections.
The sole purpose for adopting the two strategies and impinging upon so many innocent people is to make Chen look bad.
This is a president who has just over a year of his term left. This pan-blue-camp bloody-mindedness defies common sense and has forfeited all sense of proportion.
It was never likely that much popular support would fall behind a nationwide strike. And if the average person is unlikely to support a mass protest, then what can be meaningfully said about the mandate carried by the provocateurs?
The same applies to the threatened vote of no-confidence against the premier. While People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (
Why is Soong still pushing for the vote when the chances of success are so low? The answer is the same to the question of why the legislature should attempt to recall a president when it never had the numbers: to show the pan-blue support base that certain figures remain committed to a line of politics that not only excoriates Chen, but also casts aspersions against opposition rivals.
The problem is that the longer the public endures this shadow boxing, the more likely it will respond through a backlash against opposition leaders. This can already be sensed in the waning support for former Democratic Progressive Party chairman Shih Ming-teh's (
The campaign is clearly losing momentum and morale after dragging on for so long without the hoped-for result of a humiliated president packing his bags and fleeing the country -- and without even the prospect of a result.
It will not likely recover momentum and morale until prosecutors announce their decision over whether to indict suspects connected to the presidential special allowance. But it might just be that by this time opposition strategists will have dumped Shih and have started thinking about things more pressing, such as the Taipei and Kaohsiung elections at the end of this year and the next legislative elections that will leave half of the current pack of jokers without a job.
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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