Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) has formally announced his intention to stand for permanent party chairman. He has decided that he is the right person to steer the fledgling third force in Taiwan’s politics through the challenges it would certainly face in the post-Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) era, rather than serve in a caretaker role while the party finds a more suitable candidate.
Huang is sure to secure the position. He is almost certainly not the right man for the job.
Ko not only founded the party, he forged it into a one-man political force, with himself as the messianic head served by a rag-tag collection of legislators and supported by a band of young disciples. Huang is still obsessed with clearing Ko’s name in the corruption case, even if it means jeopardizing the constitutional order by casting aspersions about the independence of the judiciary. The truth is, he has to: Without Ko, the TPP could easily wither away.
Huang is weighed down by the baggage of betrayal and failure. One of the leading figures in the 2014 Sunflower movement pushing back against the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) attempts to force the controversial cross-strait service trade agreement through the legislature, he is now engaged in exactly the same behavior he once accused the KMT of. He is also doing so in the service of the KMT, with whom the TPP collectively have a legislative majority.
He joined the TPP in 2023, abandoning the foundering New Power Party, which he had cofounded and served as party chairman. This was at a time when Ko and the TPP were discussing reopening talks on a cross-strait service trade agreement. In one fell swoop, Huang turned his back on the party he founded and the movement he spearheaded.
Now in the legislature, he is selling out Ko’s original vision of the TPP as a serious alternative to the KMT/Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) dichotomy by attaching himself to the agenda of chaos orchestrated by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi(傅崐萁).
Under Huang, the TPP is so closely aligned with the KMT that it is difficult to distinguish it as a third force: It plays second fiddle to the main opposition party.
During Ko’s detention, Huang has seemed to be the perfect loyal lieutenant, arguing for Ko’s innocence. As acting chairman, rather than contain the damage to the party, Huang chose to up the ante, accusing the judiciary of acting on President William Lai’s (賴清德) behalf and inciting Ko’s supporters to engage in illegal assembly, preferring hyperbolic accusations of “political persecution” to rational legal arguments in Ko’s defense.
He is suited to being a stand-in, or a second-in-command, but he is no leader. His judgement has been blinded by his obsessive hatred for the DPP.
Ko, too, had developed an enmity for the DPP, but he has other things going for him. Where Ko is a charismatic maverick, Huang is gaining a reputation as a pent-up, petulant ranter. Where Ko cultivated a national-level profile — not least because of his two terms as mayor of the nation’s capital — Huang has accumulated a reputation for serial political failure and betrayal. While his face is known in the north, he is relatively unknown in central and southern Taiwan.
His obsession with the DPP and his slavish following of the KMT’s agenda, in the absence of any of Ko’s charms, raises questions about why Ko’s young supporters would vote for the TPP of Huang Kuo-chang, or why KMT supporters would once again view the TPP as a viable alternative.
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