DPP targeted by friends and foes

Although the public lambasting of Premier Tang Fei's (唐飛) Cabinet by DPP Secretary-General Wu Nai-jen (吳乃仁) ended with an apology, Wu's boldness won applause from more than a few of his DPP cohorts. Apart from approving of the content of Wu's invective, the DPP's Central Standing Committee (CSC) also stressed that the party "must tenaciously defend its 30 percent voter base and remind President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) not to indulge in nostalgia about his 70 percent approval rating."

This opinion spoke to the anxiety and insecurity felt collectively by the DPP's power center, legislators and its elite over the past few months. Worse yet is that the administration's operations remain cloudy. Should this situation persist, where authority and responsibility are not clearly divided and the administration is not efficient, the DPP's original socio-political base will continue to erode.

Moreover there is the fear that as a result of this eroding support base, the party might suffer losses in next year's elections. There is an acute sense of crisis growing among DPP politicians, unlike any previously felt.

Analyzing the post-election period, it is clear that changes have occurred in the socio-political foundations of the ruling party -- it is easy to see where the DPP's sense of impending crisis is coming from. According to the CSC the party's "iron votes" (鐵票) total about 30 percent of Taiwan's voters in small and large-scale elections. The majority of supporters fall into the following categories:

1. Those advocating Taiwanese consciousness (台灣意識). Stressing independence and self-determination, these are voters with a more defined sense of Hoklo (福佬) consciousness. Native Taiwanese hailing from southern Taiwan constitute an especially high percentage of this group.

2. Voters influenced by different kinds of social movements and minority groups that opposed the KMT government. Unable to break the grip of "black gold" politics under the KMT's leadership, this group chose to go with the DPP, hoping that it could help to institute societal reforms, and rid society of various unjust and long-established phenomena.

3. The "social elite" -- reformers and liberal intellectuals. They hoped that cooperation with the DPP would promote a political transition and complete democratization.

However, as the "Bian-Tang" system fails to develop efficient control of Taiwan, we find that the DPP's once solid socio-political foundation has begun eroding rather quickly.

First, proponents of Taiwanese consciousness believe that A-bian (阿扁), in order to handle cross-straits relations, has repeatedly declined to voice his support for Taiwan indepen-dence, going so far as to use the term "ROC" instead. They have discovered that what the new government advocates is not all that different from what the former government stood for. They have begun to worry that the Bian-Tang system is growing more distant, not only deviating from the basic spirit of Lee Teng-Hui's (李登輝) "two states" dictum, but gradually abandoning its original, basic principle of advocating independence.

Second, the opposition movement and social minority groups have discovered that the DPP, after assuming leadership, has undergone a rapid process of "bourgeoisification" in order to shrug off its anti-business labeling. Not only did its opposition to the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant become ambiguous, but during the controversy over working hours, labor groups found that the DPP had suddenly become the enemy.