Taiwan needs to update its election laws to ensure it has a functioning multiparty democracy by reducing the 5 percent threshold for political parties and other provisions, advocates said, after Saturday’s voting outcome wiped out all the small parties with no representation in the Legislature.
The “big two” parties of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) have dominated the nation’s politics, but in the past, there were still smaller parties in the political landscape, pro-independence Taiwan Statebuilding Party Chairman Wang Hsin-huan (王興煥) yesterday said.
“But now the ‘third force’ composed of smaller parties has been obliterated since Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) rise and his launching of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), as the party has monopolized all the operating space and resources outside of the two main parties,” he said.
Photo by Sam Yeh, AFP
Wang castigated the election laws as benefiting the big parties, while creating harsh conditions for small parties, adding that it is detrimental to a healthy multiparty democracy.
Wang pointed to the difficulties and fighting just to survive the current situation by his own Taiwan Statebuilding Party.
Other parties which once had good representation in the legislature included the People First Party, which had 46 legislators in 2001, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), which had 13 legislators in 2001, and the New Power Party (NPP), which had five legislators in 2016, he said.
In condemning the current “game rules” as being unfair, Wang said that the laws contravened principles of “electorate equity” and an “equal vote of equal value,” and called for new measures in which the threshold must be lowered, for political party ballots to have one legislative seat, in which the present way of requiring 5 percent is excessively high.
“The current electorate system has become a game of ‘big money’ and ‘making connections’ for the big parties. It is a high barrier for small parties to breach... If the 5 percent threshold stays, then many citizens might have a crisis of confidence in our government. People have told us that they like our platforms, but they believe we cannot reach [the necessary] 5 percent, so instead of voting for our party, which they are led to believe as wasting their ballot, they instead voted for the big parties,” he said.
In a related development yesterday, NPP chairwoman Claire Wang (王婉諭) announced her resignation, along with all party executives to take responsibility for the party not winning any legislative seats despite garnering 353,670 votes or 2.57 percent of the vote on Saturday.
Additionally, TSU leader Liu Yi-te (劉一德) announced that he is quitting his position and has called for an executive meeting, suggesting that the TSU close down operations after it took in 43,372 votes or 0.31 percent, and no legislative representation.
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