Taiwan’s pan-blue and pan-green camps both see November’s elections for mayors of five special municipalities as a warm-up for the 2012 presidential election. They think that if either major party wins all five elections, it is bound to win the presidency. Failing that, they believe that whichever party can win three or more of the mayoral contests will be in the strongest position ahead of the presidential vote.
However, this way of thinking reduces human behavior to rigid mathematical formulas; it doesn’t take account of the fact that people’s behavior can change at any time. Both political parties should bear in mind especially that infighting is sure to weaken either of them. In the southern cities of Tainan and Kaohsiung, the pan-greens are definitely the stronger of the two camps, but who can guarantee that the they will retain their advantage following the divisions they are now experiencing?
After Kaohsiung County Commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興) expressed his intention to stand in the November elections, challenging the official Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊), DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) rushed to Kaohsiung and had a 50-minute tete-a-tete with Yang in the hope of dissuading him.
Undeterred, Yang went ahead and announced his candidacy on Monday. Tainan City Mayor Hsu Tain-tsair (�?]), also of the DPP, looks set to stand as an independent too.
Liao Wen-chen (廖文振), chair of the Friends of Hsu Tain-tsair, which has its office in Tainan County’s Sibei Township (溪北), announced that the association’s membership had already surpassed 100,000, the threshold that Hsu himself had set for joining the race. Liao went on to say that Hsu would announce his candidacy for the Tainan mayoral election tomorrow.
With Yang having resigned from the DPP to run in the election and Hsu very likely to follow suit, both have become targets for fierce criticism from pan-green supporters. The pan-green camp points out that both Yang and Hsu have received a lot help from the DPP over the years, but instead of being grateful and supporting the party, they are now damaging its prospects.
Such views may seem reasonable, but in reality they do not stand up to scrutiny. A political party is no more than a group of people who get together to carve out a certain political territory. Anyone can join the party at any time and anyone can leave it whenever they want. Those who are nurtured by a party are generally the ones who make the biggest contributions to it. Parties should try to keep their outstanding members so that they can keep on contributing, rather than condemning those who choose to leave.
Party members who choose to quit have their own reasons for doing so. Nobody would leave a party if it better suited them to stay. Everyone knows that politicians who quit the DPP do so at the risk of ruining their political careers. The politicians themselves are surely aware of that. As for those pan-green supporters who tell other people to sacrifice personal ambition for the common good, their comments are always meant for other people’s ears. If they ever found themselves in a similar situation, they would probably forget about the need for sacrifice pretty quickly.
Most people do not realize how serious the DPP’s infighting really is. Party factions were fighting each other before the primaries and they haven’t stopped fighting since. Each faction is determined to crush its opponents. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is no more of a stranger to infighting than the DPP, but in the KMT there is more space for reconciliation, where as there is hardly any in the DPP. The reason for this difference is that the two parties have different types of supporters.
KMT supporters mostly vote for individual candidates rather than a party. When splits appear between KMT politicians, the party’s supporters also split, weakening official candidates and mavericks alike. Special circumstances apart, KMT politicians who can’t work together would generally lose to their DPP rivals. DPP supporters, in contrast, mostly vote for their party, not for individuals.
Even when two rival pan-green candidates stand in an election, supporters will flock to the stronger one. In other words, with the DPP, both victory and defeat are complete and absolute. Whoever wins DPP primaries needn’t worry about the runners-up, unlike the KMT, where those who win primaries need to garner their rivals’ support or they’ll face a split vote and defeat at the polls.
In the run-up to the last mayoral elections in 2006, Taiwan Solidarity Union candidate Lo Chih-ming (羅志明), looking for a dignified way to back out of the Kaohsiung City race, expressed his willingness to negotiate with the DPP, but people in the DPP decided that it would be enough to rely on voters dumping the smaller party’s candidate and voting for their own, so they turned down Lo’s offer.
As it turned out, they were indeed able to elbow Lo out of the way, but Lo’s re-emergence in the following legislative election caused a DPP candidate to lose in an electoral district where the party should have won. In the current mayoral elections, the campaign teams of the official DPP candidates — those who won the primaries — are again intent on crushing the runners-up.
The DPP’s infighting is not as fierce in other places as it is in Tainan and Kaohsiung. The reason why it is so intense in those two places is precisely that the DPP’s position there is so strong, so anyone it nominates is almost certain to be elected.
If the DPP wins all five mayoral posts in the upcoming municipal elections and its supporters draw the mistaken conclusion that the party is guaranteed to win the 2012 presidential poll, then infighting could be so bad when the time comes that the party’s campaign crumbles without the KMT having to lift a finger.
Chen Mao-hsiung is a retired National Sun Yat-sen University professor.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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