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Alliance Committee gets ready for a fight

`The KMT-PFP alliance in itself is a political mismatch fraught with all kinds of power conspiracies and booty-sharing.'

After canceling their plan to set up a decision-making committee to facilitate their cooperation in next year's presidential election, the KMT and PFP are ready to set up a 24-member KMT-PFP Alliance Committee.

The committee will be co-chaired by KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜). This arrangement, reached with great difficulty, was finally accomplished before the complicated political misgivings and infighting between party elders began to escalate. This means that the political battle that will be the presidential election is about to begin. Fierce fighting between the ruling and opposition camps will soon take the nation by storm.

The KMT-PFP alliance in itself is a political mismatch fraught with all kinds of power conspiracies and booty-sharing. It has also displayed ripples of rancorous sentiment and rivalry. Facing the most challenging task of sharing power on campaign policy and operations, the two sides apparently face major controversy. Even on the issue of who is to play the leading role in formulating campaign and political strategy, the two sides are struggling to reach a consensus. To stage a brilliant election campaign in an alliance framework built by way of throwing sops, jockeying for position and booty-sharing will be next to impossible.

Speed and flexibility are key assets in the formulation of campaign strategy. If you have a massive campaign-policy-making mechanism filled with rows and rows of party elders moving against the trends of the time, and if you cannot give the energetic younger generation a leading role in the campaign, then how could you expect the KMT-PFP alliance to have a refreshing image and generate a political dynamic necessary to attract votes?

Besides, in the KMT's list of committee members, only two or three are legislators while most of the members on the PFP side are legislators. Without the participation of a large number of KMT legislators, who will be the key chieftains in the campaign battle? These committee selections will surely trigger even more infighting within the KMT.

Will the KMT's elite legislators be willing to fight the campaign only to let the party elders take over power despite all their hard work like they did in the days of KMT rule? This kind of wait-and-see attitude among KMT elders may explode into party infighting.

I believe the campaign mechanism of the KMT-PFP alliance is indeed problematic. It means that campaign results will be undercut by the difficulty of unifying and integrating power, as well as by the imbalanced distribution of personnel positions. At the same time, it also means that KMT-PFP cooperation is only cosmetic, as the two parties are far apart at heart. It will be difficult for the Taiwanese public to forge high expectations of the alliance. I can almost see a return to the habits of the KMT era.

Now a new battlefield is being shaped between the old guard and those fighting for a generational takeover. This will be the prelude to the presidential campaign.

Chen Sung-shan is a member of the Civil Service Protection and Training Commission at the Examination Yuan.

Translated by Francis Huang
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