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Party fights destabilizing to Taiwanese democracy

`Chaotic and impotent governments in post-war France and Latin America in the 1970s presented dictators or army men with good opportunities. These omens are already appearing in Taiwan.'

Democracy is not a permanent state. It is brittle and delicate, and lack of progress will cause it to regress. Democracy in the West has developed for more than 200 years, but it is still in a state of constant evolution even today. This long process has been full of setbacks and stagnation. To borrow a phrase from dialectic materialism, the history of democracy has been a "dialectic process of contradiction and unification of opposites," an arduous, continuous process of integrating opposites. The two most severe setbacks were the rise of fascism and communism, in addition to the innumerable political coups and defeats of democracy.

What's the purpose of this kind of talk? It is to warn that Taiwanese democracy, if the current corruption persists, will develop towards political decline and eventually lead to dictatorship or military rule, and that both results will be welcomed by the people of Taiwan.

I'll raise a scenario: Taiwan's party politics, rotten through and through, the let's-die-together wrangling between political parties, and legislators engaging in obstructionism results in not a single important bill being passed and the full and total impotence of the government. Politicians abuse and blame each other; the economy fails to recover; corrupt politicians move about unpunished; unemployment rises uncontrolled; threats from China get more bellicose by the day. The nation seems to be in a state of anarchy.

At this time, a military general gets tired of this state of affairs and heads a military coup. He arrests all corrupt, infighting politicians and elected officials, parades them on the streets and executes them, dissolves the Legislative Yuan, and arrests all legislators. He executes derelict judges and corrupt leaders of large business enterprises who embezzle money, cleans out all criminal gangs and quickly locks them up and kills them off. He then amends the Constitution, turning Taiwan into a full presidential system. This general then sheds his military uniform for a suit and goes on to participate in a presidential election, where he proposes an economic program focusing on efficiency while closing down a majority of the originally so disruptive media. Will he win a landslide victory? Will the public support and worship him? We all know the answers to these questions without even thinking.

My own pessimistic -- or maybe that should be "optimistic" -- assertion is that he will enjoy a landslide victory and that he will be worshipped by a majority of the public. The reason for this is that everyone is so fed up with Taiwan's political gridlock and the behavior of politicians to the point of wanting to eat them alive.

The Taiwanese system is fraught with insoluble gridlock. A presidential system? A parliamentary system? A semi-presidential system? That is a major Constitutional problem. The system for electing popular representatives at all levels and their disciplinary ethics (such as conflicts of interest, the political donations law, electoral districts) is yet another insoluble problem. The petrified judicial system and the quality of judges which hampers the progress of judicial reform is another great insoluble problem. Finances and the economy, national defense, there are insoluble problems everywhere, everything is stuck. Add to this the fact that the opposition is only interested in regaining power and, ignoring the welfare of the general public, obstructs the government at every turn. The DPP is weak, incapable, opportunistic and shortsighted, votes being its only "ideal." Which part of such a democracy is worth protecting? How could the public not hope for a strongman to come forward and solve all these problems?

After World War I, Germany existed under the Weimar Republic for 14 years, creating what at the time was lauded around the world as the most advanced, perfect Constitution. But Adolf Hitler's election as chancellor of Germany put an end to the republic. Why? Endless political fighting between left and right eroded the constitutional consensus.

Professor Tsai Tsung-chen (蔡宗珍), who studies German politics, said in a paper that, "The development of pluralistic party politics under the openness of the Weimar Constitution allowed the full participation in the constitutional arena of mutually competitive political forces with incompatible opinions on fundamental issues, thus presenting them with a constitutional foundation on which they could concentrate their efforts on fundamental change in order to extract themselves from previous compromises. There should at least be some kind of systemic relationship between the broad leeway for party politics allowed, either deliberately or unintentionally, by the Weimar Constitution and the rise of Nazism!" This let's-die-together wrangling between political parties also coincided with the financial collapse caused by post-war indemnities and total popular disappointment with the government, which eventually paved the way for Hitler. Such a situation would have turned any Constitution into empty words, no matter how good it was.

Chaotic and impotent governments in post-war France and Latin America in the 1970s presented dictators or army men with good opportunities. These omens are already appearing in Taiwan. Add to this the traditional slave mentality of the Han people that exists in Taiwan, looking for patriarchal authority. If this situation persists for too long, we will see the appearance of a strongman who will destroy our democracy and still receive a warm welcome.

Pu Ta-chung is a political commentator based in Taipei.

Translated by Perry Svensson
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