When Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Chen Chu (
The KMT's reaction simply proves once again that the party has absolutely no respect whatsoever for the nation's democracy.
A clear pattern has developed in recent years, with the party protesting the result of any important election it loses.
It began with the 2000 presidential election. When the KMT received a thumping following James Soong's (
The trend continued with weeks of protests following the KMT's narrow presidential defeat in 2004, when the election-eve shooting of President Chen Shui-bian (
To that list add Kaohsiung 2006.
Maybe this is why the pan-blue camp has come to be known as the "refuse to lose crowd" by certain sections of the US diplomatic community, including former American Institute in Taiwan chairwoman Therese Shaheen, who wrote about it in a Wall Street Journal article on Nov. 8.
When was the last time a KMT figure stood up and accepted defeat graciously or even lauded Taiwan's democratic achievements?
The party's total disdain for democracy can be seen in the way it has systematically undermined the leadership of its popularly elected chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
And the KMT's decision to establish a working relationship with the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party further demonstrates its contempt for the nation's democratic system.
It was former president and KMT chairman Lee Teng-hui (
Certain sections of the party's old guard are so unwilling to accept defeat that they would happily bring back one-party authoritarian rule tomorrow if they thought they could get away with it.
The KMT's strategy of trying to make Saturday's elections a plebiscite on the integrity of its chairman and the president failed. For whatever reasons, voters showed that politicians getting their fingers caught in the cash register wasn't enough for them to change their political affiliation.
So instead of blaming their Kaohsiung defeat on faulty ballot-counting and vote-buying accusations, the KMT should start looking at the reasons why the majority of voters in the south continue to reject them.
The KMT needs to put two and two together and work out why the popularity it enjoyed during the Lee era has vanished.
But it won't.
The party's troubles stem from arrogance, an inability to believe it is wrong and a reluctance to examine unpopular policy platforms and revise them accordingly -- all of which are critical to democratic success.
Only when it does this will it be able to stop calling into question the integrity of the nation's democratic institutions and instead make them work in the party's favor.
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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