Although President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has access to ample party and government resources allowing him to issue both threats and promises, he stumbled in Saturday’s legislative by-elections. This will have an impact on the year-end special municipality elections, and it also shows that Ma no longer has the ability to arouse enthusiasm among pan-blue supporters — voter turnout on Saturday was less than 40 percent — who no longer feel that supporting Ma gives them a sense of mission.
Some voters have said they “feel nothing.” This has created an atmosphere in which pan-blue supporters feel they must abandon Ma to save the pan-blue camp, and some are beginning to talk about supporting Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強).
When Ma won the presidential election on the back of 7.65 million votes, his campaign team proclaimed: “Ma does not rely on the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the party relies on Ma.” They implied KMT officials and party workers were not worth much and were in great need of “reform and renewal.”
For example, when KMT Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金浦聰) brought in Ryan Wu (吳睿穎) to “reform” the personnel administration, he just fumbled in the dark and even made a big affair of recalling many heads of county and city branches to party headquarters where they were punished for not working hard enough during the elections.
Outspoken KMT Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) said King thought “he had dug up treasure [in Wu], but he really only dug up a pile of shit.”
The problem is that after Ma and King teamed up and started playing up reform, their calls seemed to lack concrete content or direction. They have also failed to return the party’s stolen assets. Everything remained words on paper, which made the call for reform seem more like a slogan and an excuse for a purge.
In their attempts at manipulating local elections, party branches simply used Ma’s people. Some candidates were “parachuted” in while others were local candidates, and this was a cause of conflict that stirred up much ill feeling and instilled a sense of crisis in powerful local faction leaders because they were part of Ma and King’s “reform” target. Small wonder that there wasn’t much unity.
Ma’s inability to govern and his lackluster results have made life difficult for the public. Unemployment has gone up, civic order is deteriorating and the government is incapable of satisfying voters’ demands. The government’s pro-China policies lack vision, and this is frequently the reason the public calls for change.
The lack of direction has meant that there has been no structure to reforms. The reorganization of the Presidential Office, the Cabinet and the party has turned these institutions into a campaign team, only with some temporary make-up applied. The election organization is the only part that has been given some thorough thought, and there is a lack of comprehensive political considerations. Consideration is given only to the interests of big business and those whose business involves both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
This does not go unnoticed by voters, so when there is an election, they of course want to teach the government a lesson so that it understands what the public want, which is placing Taiwan first.
In short, the biggest defeat for Ma’s oligarchical rule is that the KMT no longer knows for whom or what it is fighting, while those who are afraid of becoming completely dominated by China no longer know where Taiwan’s future lies. It is not very strange that we are now hearing cries of “We love the emperor, but we love Rome more” from within the KMT.
Lu I-ming is a former publisher and president of the Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News.
TRANSLATED BY PERRY SVENSSON
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