While the pan-blue and pan-green camps say different things about who will win next month’s special municipality elections, many people now believe the pan-green camp will secure more votes. The importance of this cannot be ignored.
Signs of this switch to the pan-greens were apparent some time ago from opinion polls run by the Chinese-language Global Views Monthly and CommonWealth magazines, which showed more trust and better approval rating for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) compared with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
These results explain one thing: Elections in Taiwan have nothing to do with the pendulum or domino effect spoken about by Broadcasting Corp of China chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), but rather are about a shift in the geographical makeup of support for the political parties. Both the pendulum and domino effects are short-term developments, while changes in geographical makeup refer to a longer-term change in the makeup of society.
The changes in support over the last two decades can be divided into three distinct stages.
First, during the democratization that took place in the 1990s, the DPP gained support as a result of a strong desire for reform from the middle class, skilled workers and small and medium-sized enterprises. In the space of a decade, support for the pan-green camp went from about 20 percent in legislative elections in the 1980s to more than 30 percent, while they also started receiving more than 40 percent of the votes in mayoral and county commissioner elections. There was not yet a discernible north-south divide in support, although the vast majority of agricultural workers supported the KMT.
Second, from 1990 until 2008, the KMT won more middle-class support from the north, while the lower-middle class and agricultural workers from the south began to support the pan-greens. However, before 2004, there was a major shift in the north and this saw a continued increase in the overall number of votes obtained by the pan-green camp. After 2005, there was no change in middle-class support, although agricultural workers started to make a slight shift back to the pan-blue camp. This saw the pan-greens suffer a series of serious setbacks in elections and while they were still ahead of the pan-blues in the south, their lead had already begun to shrink considerably.
Third, from the end of 2008, a continual shift toward the pan-green camp among the middle and working classes has seen it gain a dominant advantage in the south. Broader middle-class support has also started to return to the pan-greens, which has led to a series of bitter losses in legislative by-elections all around Taiwan for the KMT. Further, the last few polls suggest that the pan-blues may have already lost its stronghold in Taipei City and things look even in terms of the upcoming election for the soon-to-be established Sinbei City.
From these developments, we can see that the changes in support for political parties along class lines have been considerable, and that they need at least seven or eight years to start to form a pattern. In most cases, more than a decade is needed before changes can be seen. Clearly, the pendulum and domino effects cannot explain these changes.
The only way we can describe these changes is movements in the geographical makeup of support for political parties. Such changes imply that in the globalized trade regime of the global economy, the policies of political parties will play increasingly important roles. When the global trade system and policies start to interact, all sorts of huge changes in the traditional support bases for political parties become possible.
Lin Cho-shui is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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