“The voters have taught President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) a lesson.” The comment may seem hackneyed, but however you view the results of last Saturday’s local government elections, this is the one clear conclusion to be drawn from them.
With respect to county and city seats, the only constituency the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won back was Yilan County, and it held on to three others. It is fair to say that the DPP won where it should have won and lost where it was going to lose anyway.
When it comes to the overall number of votes, however, the DPP got nearly 46 percent, the highest it has ever received in elections for city mayors and county commissioners since it was founded. In 1997 the DPP won control of 12 cities and counties, but it only got 43 percent of the total vote.
This time the party’s vote went up in every constituency bar Hualien County, where it did not put up a candidate. The result was close even in cities and counties where the DPP was expected to lose heavily.
In Taoyuan County the DPP lost by 180,000 votes four years ago, and by 300,000 votes in last year’s presidential election. The last opinion poll published before last weekend’s elections by the United Daily News indicated that support for DPP candidate Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) was only 10 percent, but Cheng got 46 percent of the vote, less than 50,000 votes short of victory. This came as a surprise not just for the media, but even for many seasoned veterans in the pan-green camp.
In Taitung County, the DPP closed the gap from 20,000 votes in 2005 to around 5,000 this time. If we subtract the votes of the county’s Aborigines, who are mostly loyal Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) voters, the DPP would have won in Taitung. This result shows how angry people in Taitung are about the performance of outgoing county commissioner Kuang Li-chen (鄺麗貞), who used to enjoy Ma’s strong support.
Even voters in Hualien County, who for decades have been solidly loyal to the KMT, did not help Ma save face, giving KMT candidate Du Li-hua (杜麗華) less than half the votes of the winner, independent Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁).
Outgoing Hualien County Commissioner Hsieh Shen-shan (謝深山) voiced his firm support for Deputy Commissioner Zhang Zhi-ming (張志明), also standing as an independent, even though he knew Zhang would lose by a wide margin. Hsieh could be expelled from the KMT for this, but his insistence on doing so made it clear he doesn’t care.
KMT Chairman Ma did what he had to do in expelling Zhang for standing against the official KMT candidate, but he would find it hard to explain why Hsieh, a veteran who joined the party decades ago, chose to ignore his wishes and his authority.
The 2005 elections for mayors and county commissioners marked a shift of territory between the pan-blue and pan-green camps, with the DPP suffering its heaviest defeat as a result of malpractice cases involving Chen Che-nan (陳哲男), former deputy secretary-general to then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), and Chao Chien-ming (趙建銘), Chen Shui-bian’s son-in-law.
It suffered another heavy defeat in the 2007 legislative election, and was beaten by 2.7 million votes in last year’s presidential contest.
This time, however, the DPP’s vote has not just stopped falling, but risen to its highest point ever. The four-year trend of dwindling votes for the pan-greens and growing support for the pan-blues has finally been reversed.
Legislative by-elections in Taoyuan, Taichung, Hualien and Taitung a month from now could prove even more interesting. Judging by the results of the Dec. 5 polls, while Hualien is still impregnable for the DPP, it has a chance of winning all the other three seats.
Where has Ma gone wrong in the year and a half since he took office to have the electorate punish him like this?
This question can’t be answered in a few words. Politicians and TV pundits from both green and blue camps may offer different explanations. DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) says it is because the public is unhappy about Ma’s China policies.
There is no doubt some truth in that, but it can’t explain the structural shift that has taken place in the originally solid pro-blue counties of Hualien, Taitung and Taoyuan, where the DPP’s electoral gains were well above its leaders’ own expectations.
It would be simpler to ask what Ma has done right. It is, perhaps, the nub of the matter, and it is where Ma should start examining his own record.
Liang Wen-chieh is deputy director of the New Society for Taiwan.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017