Print

Mail

wiki links

Editoiral: Progress comes in small steps

After multiple but futile attempts by the pan-green parties, on Friday a section of the long-stalled arms procurement bill was finally placed on the legislative agenda. While passage through the Legislative Yuan's Procedure Committee does not mean the bill will necessarily be approved, those who have been keeping up with the history of this bill know only too well how difficult it has been to get this far.

Many factors contributed to this latest development. However, the attitude of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) played a key role. In the past, the KMT followed the line of the People First Party (PFP) in boycotting the bill. Given that the KMT holds a much larger number of seats in the Legislative Yuan, some may have wondered why it allowed itself to be manipulated by a much smaller party.

This had much to do with the KMT's fear that the PFP would steal the conservative segment of the party's voter base. This resulted in the KMT repeatedly bending over backwards to mirror the PFP on issues such as the arms procurement bills and cross-strait relations.

However, the recent Taipei and Kaohsiung mayoral elections, as well as the city council elections, gave the KMT a belated wake up call. PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) was defeated by an embarrassingly large margin, even trailing far behind Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), who achieved a decent result despite the series of scandals involving President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and the first family.

The number of seats held by the PFP in the city councils also shrank. This is not to mention that the KMT itself did not perform as well as many had expected -- losing the Kaohsiung mayoral election and winning by a much smaller margin than anticipated in the Taipei mayoral race.

All this prompted the KMT to re-evaluate its political relationship with the PFP. The PFP was shown to be a political lightweight and the KMT began to question the wisdom of following the PFP on major policy issues.

Hopefully Friday's step forward was the beginning of a move to the middle ground by the KMT and the pan-blues more generally. The initiative made clear where power resides on the pan-blue side of politics and more of the same can be expected in the coming year.

The KMT's show of force may be the straw that will break the PFP's back. Anyone within the PFP who had the slightest illusion that the party had a future must now be disillusioned.

After seeing a consistent and seemingly unbreakable line of divide between the pan-green and pan-blue forces, it was encouraging for ordinary people to see a slight change of scenery -- the KMT agreeing with the DPP on a long-standing and controversial issue. Irrespective of whether the arms procurement bill is finally approved, political progress has been made.
This story has been viewed 1104 times.