Taiwan’s major political parties are engaged in intense campaigning for next year’s presidential and legislative elections. From the perspective of Taiwanese ethnic groups, every time there is an election, indigenous people can do little but watch from the sidelines.
After elections, the inaugurations of new presidents, legislators and ministers seem to have nothing to do with them, with the exception of whoever wins the six indigenous legislative seats and whoever becomes minister of the Council of Indigenous Peoples, which are normally allocated to indigenous people.
Other important ministers and legislators are almost always exclusively Han elites.
No matter which party is in power, the disadvantages indigenous people face in political participation does not improve. In the 2020 legislative elections, four parties crossed the threshold of 5 percent of the vote to nominate legislators-at-large, but they either did not recommend indigenous lawmakers or had put them low in their rankings of lawmakers, giving them little chance of winning a seat.
There is not a single indigenous representative among the 34 legislators-at-large.
The idea of legislators-at-large is to allow parties to recommend experts or representatives of underrepresented groups to uphold the ideal of taking care of disadvantaged people and ethnic minorities.
Hopefully, the main political parties in the January elections would recommend representatives of ethnic minorities and disadvantaged groups for legislator-at-large seats to give them a voice in the legislature and realize transitional justice.
It would create a positive image for the parties and win the support of voters.
Kuo Chun-yen is a professor of Providence University’s Department of Social Work and Child Welfare.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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