With the legislative and presidential elections less than a year away, the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has been busy maneuvering to ensure Ma’s re-election.
A driving force behind this move is Ma’s low popularity rating, which is barely 33 percent, according to a recent survey, and Ma and his handlers are obviously nervous and are looking for ways to turn the tide around.
One controversial move that has generated heated debate was the decision by the Central Election Commission (CEC) last week to combine the legislative elections, originally scheduled for December or early next year, and the presidential election, scheduled for March 20 next year. The combined elections will be held on Jan. 14.
By combining the elections, the administration is likely hoping to boost voter turnout, which would benefit Ma. Voters who are lukewarm about his performance might go to the polls to vote for their favored legislative candidate (perhaps induced by a financial incentive from the cash-rich KMT) and then think they might as well as vote to re-elect the president too.
The official argument is that merging the elections would save taxpayers about NT$500 million (US$17.3 million). That is an argument that always plays well, but interestingly enough, the administration has at the same time been pushing for a 3 percent salary increase for civil servants. That would cost taxpayers another NT$2 billion per year, but the beneficiaries would only be a group of voters who are likely to vote for Ma.
The CEC should have paused and reflected on two other implications of merging the elections. First, the elections are now scheduled for the middle of January, but the presidential inauguration date remains unchanged: May 20. This transition period of more than four months doesn’t bode well for Taiwan’s young democracy.
If the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) were to win, it would not be unthinkable that pro-China elements in Taiwan could cause havoc, leading to social and political instability, which in turn would give Beijing an excuse to intervene and prevent the newly elected government from assuming power.
The least that needs to be done by the legislature to amend the situation is to move the inauguration of the president forward so that the lame-duck period is minimized and the newly elected president can start governing effectively within two months of the election.
Second, combining the elections would have a negative impact on the system of checks and balances in government. The strength of the US system is that it has mid-term elections in which the electorate can express its views on the policies of a sitting president. With the new system, Taiwanese will have to wait a four years before they can voice themselves through the ballot.
This move seems to be a careful calculation to give the KMT an advantage, while creating obstacles for DPP supporters. By holding the presidential election two months early, it will deprive about 50,000 first-time voters who were born between Jan. 14 and March 20 from voting. Polls show this group of young voters is more likely to vote for the DPP.
Ma, who was elected in 2008 with a comfortable margin and whose party holds a legislative majority, has lost credibility with the public. His policies have resulted in high unemployment and people are much worse off than before. Now that his re-election prospects are dim, he has resorted to these electoral moves with the intention of influencing voters.
Democracy is a hard-won Taiwanese achievement. Taiwan can remain truly free and democratic only if people can openly and freely express their preferences for leaders in elections that are fair and just.
Chen Mei-chin is a commentator living in Washington.
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
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,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS