With exactly a month to go before the Dec. 5 three-in-one local government and township elections, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) launched its campaign on Wednesday, calling on voters to punish the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government for its poor performance.
After almost two years in the wilderness following the DPP’s crushing defeats in legislative and presidential elections, and the ongoing struggle to contain the fallout from former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) saga, the DPP seems confident that now is a good time to start its comeback.
The present conditions are certainly favorable, as the KMT finds itself beset with problems.
Aside from the numerous splits it faces in the county commissioner races, the KMT goes into the elections with a poor record at national level since returning to power. Pre-election promises on the economy and the benefits of increased cross-strait interaction have failed to materialize, and despite having a legislative majority the KMT still seems to have trouble passing any legislation of substance.
The government’s handling of several problems, including Typhoon Morakot and now the US beef controversy, has made a mockery of the KMT’s oft-repeated claims during the Chen administration that only it had the experience to govern.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has proved to be anything but the smooth operator his pre-election imagery promised. It turns out the Keystone Cops would have been a more accurate image.
As a weak leader, Ma’s decision to take over as KMT chairman is only likely to increase his problems if early indications — such as the party’s recent Central Standing Committee election fiasco — are anything to go by.
Worst of all, the KMT has cozied up to the Chinese Communist Party in ways that pose a real threat to the nation’s democracy and independence.
While it is true that local elections focus mainly on local issues, the poor performance of the government cannot fail to have some effect on the appeal of KMT candidates.
Nevertheless, the DPP cannot afford to rest on its laurels.
Simply lambasting the KMT for doing a terrible job may be an effective, risk-free strategy for now — after all, it’s a strategy the KMT used successfully — and doing so certainly provides the DPP with plenty of ammunition, but it will not help the party solidify support for future elections.
Two years is a long time in politics, so even if the DPP does do well next month, it will need something else to fall back on should the government manage to get its act together and navigate its way to 2012 on the back of an improving economy while avoiding any more major mishaps.
At the local level, the DPP did lots of good work post-Morakot at the grassroots level, but this was in the south where support is already strong. The DPP really needs to build on this and formulate a concerted, long-term effort to make inroads into areas north of the Jhuoshuei River (濁水溪), taking the battle against the KMT into the pan-blue heartlands. This will not be easy.
On a national scale, meanwhile, first and foremost the DPP needs to come up with a coherent China policy ahead of 2012, as Taiwan’s giant rival is an issue that any prospective government needs to tackle head-on.
With Taiwan’s future at stake, the DPP cannot afford to rely solely on disappointed KMT voters and the cyclical changes of power that occur in mature democracies, because unlike other nations, Taiwan has powerful external forces working to make sure that doesn’t happen.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS