EDITORIAL: A new legislature and old tricks

When the new format for today's legislative elections was finalized, this newspaper supported it despite anomalies in voter-legislator ratios across counties that give one side -- the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) -- a distinct advantage.

The change from a near-anarchic system of multiple candidates per district to a single-member system was necessary to increase long-term accountability of legislators to their constituents. In the short term, there were always going to be teething problems, and in this campaign they have been very apparent.

The changes have been condemned in some quarters as increasing the power of legislators and turning electoral districts into corrupt fiefdoms. This criticism ignores the fact that the new legislator-at-large vote ensures that an increased proportion of candidates is elected by party affiliation. A balance of interests between legislators who answer to party headquarters and those who answer to local constituents is a vast improvement over what came before.

The new system was never going to eliminate the pestilence of vote-buying. Commentators who hoped at the time that the entrenched culture of vote captains, factional patronage and illegal surveillance of voting behavior would disappear overnight were naive; in the face of thousands of reports of vote-buying and other mischief, some analysts now seem nostalgic for the old regime, which is absurd.

Aberrant election culture can only be reformed if there is a bipartisan commitment to do so. The KMT, for its part, has spent vast amounts of advertising dollars sabotaging the referendums while ridiculing the Central Election Commission and manipulating election conditions through sympathetic local governments, which suggests that bipartisanship will not be possible anytime soon.

Even by Taiwanese standards, this campaign has been short on policy and long on inept character assassination, laughable melodrama and dubious incidents of "violence." The KMT is highly likely to have an outright majority in the next legislature, and this has forced many candidates to turn the contest into one based on image, charisma, notoriety and slanging matches rather than content and ability.

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) must get between 40 and 45 of the 113 seats to maintain its current representation; more than 45 would be a big bonus, but a few seats less than 40 would be catastrophic because it would give the KMT an outright two-thirds majority -- or the prospect of forging one with sympathetic minor parties and/or independents.

The KMT would then have the power to effect radical change at the expense of democratic institutions -- and even national security.

The DPP's failure to cut a deal with the Taiwan Solidarity Union will likely lose it one nominally pan-green seat (Chiayi City) and scuttle a number of closer contests elsewhere through a fracturing of the pan-green vote. The KMT is much less likely to suffer from votes leaking to its stablemate, the New Party.

On the referendum questions, a low voter turnout and the KMT boycott will likely invalidate the plebiscite through a failure to reach threshold.

The DPP has failed to make significant inroads into KMT dominance over local politics, and this will be reflected in a district vote that will reward the KMT for its regressive behavior. Of more interest is the new and purely party-based vote for legislators-at-large. This offers a preview of the presidential election and may yet give the DPP and presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) a boost.

Today should mark the functional demise of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), the main target of the KMT's campaign. It is possible that Chen deliberately set himself up for a fall over today's results, but one way or another, it is high time for Hsieh to step up and make the presidential campaign his own.