Editorial: Lee's departure to leave void

So Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) is to step down from the KMT chairmanship sooner than at first we thought, though how much sooner we will only find out tomorrow. In a way this is as it should be. In almost any Western democracy, the leader of a party that had sustained as bad a thrashing at the polls as the KMT would consider that giving up his job was the only honorable course. Lee's decision to do this thus marks another step in the normalization of Taiwan's democratic politics and a welcome change for a party notoriously shy of taking the blame.

This does, however, complicate things for President-elect Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁). Chen needed the like-minded Lee at the helm of the KMT for several months -- if only to use Lee's personal clout to facilitate setting up the ground rules on engagement between the new president and the KMT-dominated legislature. Now Lee's help in working out some kind of accommodation between the two sides will no longer be available and, as a result, the relationship between the new government and the legislature may be stormy.

What might compound this is that, while there is much talk of reforming the KMT, there is little idea about what that reform would consist of or what kind of party would be the result. There have been party reform plans around for over a decade but nothing has ever come of them. Partly this is because of the Leninist nature of the KMT which makes it particularly unmalleable. And partly it is because Lee, who despises the party he leads and has never wanted to reform it because he didn't want to improve its chances of survival.

Right now the KMT resembles the British Conservative party after its devastating defeat by Tony Blair's Labor party in 1998. While it seemed obvious to everyone outside the party that it had been rejected because of its muddle-headed anti-Europeanism, the party faithful insisted that it had lost because it had in fact been not nearly anti-European enough. So it might be with the KMT. Many of those who watched the final day of campaigning last Friday could not but gasp as Lien Chan's (連戰) final rally tried to resurrect old-guard KMT values -- the singing of "Praising the Republic of China (中華民國頌)," being a particularly mind-bending highlight. There is a good chance that this swing back to the KMT of yore, actually the KMT as many of its members still see it, the party of Sun Yat-sen and the three principles of the people, will gather speed. Whether James Soong (宋楚瑜) comes back into the fold or not, the party looks set to be run by the young mainlanders who orchestrated Lien's terrible campaign and they will pander to a membership that says that the reason for the party's defeat was not that it ran a numbingly stupid election campaign but that it was too equivocal about what it stood for.

Should the KMT take this path its support base will quickly be reduced to a small, angry rump of discontented mainlanders, doomed to opposition for the foreseeable future.

If British politics provides an example of the direction in which the KMT is moving, it also provides an example of the road back. The Labor party lost four elections in succession because it preferred dogmatic extremism to coming to terms with the reality of late 20th century Britain and the middle-class aspirations of its traditional working-class voter base. The KMT likewise needs to look not at its ideological roots, but at what most Taiwan voters really want, and persuade them it can deliver. This seems sensible enough, but do not, in these times, expect common sense to win arguments.