The new Cabinet started work yesterday, almost one month to the day that the veneer of competence of former premier Liu Chao-shiuan’s (劉兆玄) Cabinet began to peel away in the face of the battering Taiwan suffered from Typhoon Morakot.
The reshuffle was not as comprehensive as many had hoped — with just 12 new faces among the Cabinet’s 38 members. However, nearly all those deemed to be responsible for the flawed response to Morakot — the premier, vice premier, Cabinet secretary-general, interior minister, defense minister, foreign minister and Council of Indigenous Peoples minister — are gone.
Several ministers whose performance has been anything but satisfactory, namely Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰), Environmental Protection Administration Minister Stephen Shen (沈世宏), Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Wu-hsiung (陳武雄) and Council of Labor Affairs Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄), managed to hold on to their positions and must be relieved that the focus of the reshuffle was firmly fixed on culpability over Morakot.
Nevertheless, the aftermath of the disaster put the spotlight on Ma’s inability to gauge public opinion. Looking back, his failure to declare a state of emergency was a strategic error that led to a big loss of confidence in the president and his administration that it never recovered from. That, and the insensitivity shown by many top members of the former Cabinet following the flooding, made a reshuffle unavoidable.
Ma’s apparent lack of political nous was further highlighted by his reported intention to retain Liu, even in the face of the premier’s record low approval rating.
Ma came to power with promises of continuity in the Executive Yuan — his predecessor Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) had been criticized after going through six premiers in eight years -— but he has quickly learned that governing a country is unpredictable and that even the best laid plans go to waste.
A new Cabinet was the only way for Ma to salvage his slumping approval rating and begin to rehabilitate his image in the two years he has left before beginning his campaign for a second term.
This was the rationale behind Ma’s decision to ditch his favored tactic of installing academics and technocrats in senior positions in favor of figures with experience in local politics. Commentators have already christened the new Executive Yuan line-up an “election Cabinet” and there is no doubt Ma made these choices with one eye on 2012.
New Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and his team have their work cut out if they are to help Ma achieve his re-election goal. Together with the mammoth task of post-Morakot reconstruction, the new Cabinet’s priority will be to get the economy back on track.
Voters and the opposition will not let Ma forget his promises of a second economic miracle, but with a self-created slump in tax revenues, soaring government debt and record unemployment, those promises seem an awful long way from materializing.
If the new Cabinet cannot turn things around, and quickly, then Ma’s hopes for a second four-year term may struggle to materialize.
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