After an election defeat, one should step back and seek reform, for political accountability but also and more importantly to maintain vitality within the party.
But this is still not enough, and politicians should make promises to the electorate to be given a second chance. They should earn back the electorate's trust with promises of reform. This may well be the normal track of party politics in a democratic society, but it does not apply to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). The KMT is an exception to the rules.
If this is not the case, why is the KMT's core leadership still sitting pretty after its defeat in the 2000 presidential election, a second Waterloo in the 2001 legislative elections and the latest blow in last month's presidential election? Despite this string of setbacks, the KMT's chairman, Lien Chan (
The problem is that if the KMT continues to procrastinate on far-reaching reforms and reflection, the day of party disintegration is not far off. Especially if the KMT concedes its status as the biggest opposition party in the legislature to the People First Party (PFP) in the year-end election, the last chapter of the KMT's century-long history will come to an end.
This is why some concerned people in the KMT are crying out for generational change and demanding accountability.
Lien is not the product of a democratic society. Instead, he is the successor raised and trained by Chiang Kai-shek's (
Is he good at what he is doing? How else could he have driven out former KMT chairman Lee Teng-hui (
Yet this is not Lien's secret weapon. Lien's most superb feat is turning his failure into the very shield with which to defend himself. In the face of overwhelming pressure for reforms, Lien says that the KMT does not have any political capital to be divided. He says the KMT must unite or it will fall into the enemy's grip. Lien concluded that the reforms are in the KMT's hands, not in the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP), let alone in President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁). Lien's strategy is obvious -- taking the DPP and Chen as excuses to block the KMT's would-be reformers' hope for a party revival and politicizing the advantaged position of the rival party to meet his own ends of consolidating the KMT core leadership. Despite the fact that Lien always replaces an "I" with a "we" to back up his claims, it is Lien alone who is pulling the strings behind the scenes.
The greatest problem for the KMT is not the DPP's opportunism. Even if there were such an opportunistic DPP, it is up to the public to decide whether the DPP is to be trusted. We can clearly see through Lien's ruse of using Chen as a weapon to defend his own position, and this ruse only proves that Lien can turn his shortcomings to his advantages, hoping to turn defeat into a victory.
Chin Heng-wei is the editor in chief of Contemporary Monthly magazine.
Translated by Wang Hsiao-wen
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