Only a little more than two months are left before mayoral and council elections in the special municipalities, which will be held on Nov. 27. As the campaigns heat up, it is apparent that the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed between Taiwan and China in June is not going to be a factor in the big-city election results.
In Taiwan, elections are duels between two main parties — the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Of course, voters will pay attention to the candidates’ characters and abilities, but apart from that, the key to winning votes lies in the two big parties’ abilities to choose the right campaign issues.
Since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office in May 2008, he has had more downs than ups politically. He had been in office just four months when the bankruptcy of US security firm Lehman Brothers set off a global financial tsunami. Taiwan, which has always relied on international trade as the main driving force for its economic growth, was badly battered and its economy went into recession.
In the fourth quarter of 2008, Taiwan’s economy shrank by 8.36 percent — the sharpest decline since quarterly GDP numbers began being recorded in 1961. GDP growth for the whole of last year was minus 1.87 percent, the poorest annual figure since Taiwan first started publishing official economic growth numbers. As the crisis took hold, the high hopes many people had invested in a KMT administration vanished in a puff of smoke.
Ma’s government has set its hopes for saving Taiwan’s economy on China, and China has bent over backwards to give Ma’s team whatever it asks for in cross-strait negotiations. As Ma sees it, former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) administration had an isolationist approach to cross-strait economic and trade relations, so Ma is eager to use his time in office to make up for lost ground by accelerating Taiwan’s integration into the greater China economy.
Over the past two years, cross-strait relations have come to be the central theme of Ma’s government policy and this is the aspect in which this government feels it has made its greatest achievements.
The government is optimistic that Taiwan’s economic growth will rise to about 8 percent following the signing of the ECFA, and the KMT hopes the economic benefits will be the magic formula for winning voter support. This has overshadowed municipal issues — the ones that most concern ordinary people — which have become a secondary issue in the KMT’s campaign strategy.
The KMT has made a mistake by ignoring ordinary people’s perceptions of the overall economic climate and overlooking the issues that concern them most in the run-up to the municipal elections. In contrast, the DPP has clearly recognized that good governance and the growing gap between rich and poor are the most important issues for voters in local polls.
Since 1998, salaries in Taiwan have been falling increasingly far behind GDP growth. At the same time, the rich-poor gap has become wider than ever, as the average income of the richest 20 percent of households is now 8.22 times that of the poorest 20 percent. When price rises are taken into account, real salaries for most employees have fallen back to where they were 13 years ago. For most employees, economic growth has only served to fuel their resentment and sense of being exploited.
Surveys conducted by the Mainland Affairs Council over the past couple of years about people’s attitudes to the relaxation of cross-strait economic and business ties reveal that, among all professions, it is workers, that is, wage earners, who are most likely to think that Taiwan is opening up too fast. These people, who fear that their interests will suffer with the opening up of the cross-strait market, are gradually consolidating into the political bedrock of the DPP.
Alongside these cold statistics, recent months have seen a series of incidents similar to what happened at Dapu (大埔) in Miaoli County, where rice fields were callously bulldozed to prepare the ground for building an industrial zone. There have also been clashes over environmental issues at the Central Taiwan Science Park and fires and pollution at Formosa Plastics’ Mailiao (麥寮) petrochemicals plant. The KMT government’s handling of these incidents has deepened the public’s impression that it is on closer terms with big business than with the general public.
Elections for local leaders hinge on good governance, but the Taipei City Government’s attitude in handling controversies about the Taipei International Flora Exposition has raised big questions about the quality and efficiency of governance in the city. Voters are very disappointed by the KMT’s performance.
A recent survey by CommonWealth magazine showed that when it comes to people’s perception of local governance, DPP county commissioners and city mayors beat most KMT local leaders hands down.
A series of policy blunders has led a lot of voters who originally supported the KMT and its pan-blue allies to lose their enthusiasm. Most of these people cannot be expected to vote for the opposition, but the KMT’s problem is that they may not turn out to vote at all. Consequently, the KMT faces an uphill struggle in the municipal elections.
The KMT originally hoped that it could use the ECFA to its advantage in the election campaign, but as people’s desire for good governance and their resentment over the rich-poor divide comes to the fore, the KMT’s strategy appears to be nothing but a mirage.
Both the KMT and the Chinese government, which has been playing along with Ma’s strategy, had better get wise to the reality of public opinion in Taiwan today. That reality is that cross-strait issues won’t have any effect on the outcome of November’s municipal elections.
Hong Chi-chang is a former chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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