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Editorial: Ma Ying-jeou and the wrecking ball

There has been so much drivel spread by the pan-blue camp over the holding of referendums in tandem with elections that a visitor from another planet might wonder if Taiwanese are as bovine as hardline Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party (PFP) figures would have us believe.

There is no question that simultaneous elections and referendums have a political purpose. Holding them separately has political uses, too, so whatever the Central Election Commission decides to do with this overblown debate, there will be a political benefit for someone.

The issue to note carefully is that the pan-blue camp wants to prevent tandem poll-plebiscites so that it can maximize the effect of a boycott on any referendum it chooses not to support. The distinction between a successful boycott and a "no" vote is worth repeating: The former invalidates the referendum, while the latter defeats the proposal.

By plugging for the former option, the pan-blue camp wishes to invalidate a democratic function -- it therefore must employ Orwellian word games to suggest that democracy is at risk if it does not. The KMT in particular is the prime mover in preventing valid plebiscites: It wishes to prevent a majority of Taiwanese from saying yes or no to any question that has a bearing on the future of the country.

This is not a debate about democracy but a display of mischief by hack operators whose hysteria and routine dissembling are entrenched in the political landscape. Broadcast enough of this material and the effect is one of charlatans shouting down the informed and the skeptical to the detriment of ordinary people on both sides of the political fence.

Since 2000 the pan-blue camp has fine-tuned the practice of attacking the integrity of the very institutions it created when it was in power all for all those decades.

It is doing this simply because it can. But if and when power is returned to the pan-blue camp we can be sure that its tune will change very quickly.

Such pragmatism is on display in Taipei County, where on-again, off-again KMT member and County Commissioner Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋) has repaid DPP support for upgrading the county's status by trying to turn the country government into a fiefdom and taking control of police affairs from the National Police Agency.

The national government dare not challenge Chou too robustly in the lead-up to next year's polls: The last thing the government wants is to alienate the very large number of Taipei County residents after handing them special municipality status.

One way or another, it seems that leading KMT figures have learned that the only way to deal with DPP governments is to attack not just the officers and the party, but more fundamentally the institutions themselves and the processes that protect the rights of ordinary people and administrative stability.

The KMT was once a tightly drilled Leninist party that ensured everyone was ultimately accountable to one man. These days the KMT retains many of the ideological trappings and grim fantasies of a Leninist party, but it is also beginning to display an anarchy and a poor man's warlordism that forces one to wonder how presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) -- hardly an intimidating man and never popular among established KMT cliques -- will rope in his wrecking-ball colleagues if he is elected to office.

The question then is who will wield the real power in the KMT, the power that would have a significant, possibly decisive, bearing on the nation's security and well-being, and especially on the structures of state and the foundations of a democratic polity.
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