The three-way battle for the Kaohsiung mayorship is complicated. When Kaohsiung County Commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興), a former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) member and now independent candidate in the Greater Kaohsiung mayoral election, sent out invitations to the opening of his campaign headquarters, the invitation listed former Kaohsiung county commissioner and spiritual leader of the county’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) “White Faction” (白派) Lin Yuan-yuan (林淵源) as heading the campaign.
This caused quite a stir within the KMT. Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), also a senior member of the White Faction, quickly held a press conference with Lin to deny that the latter would be heading Yang’s campaign headquarters. Lin clarified which candidate he supported.
To further complicate matters, Lin and pan-blue heavyweight, former presidential hopeful and People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) openly stumped for Yang on Oct. 17. All these things have filled the campaign for Kaohsiung with a multitude of peculiar twists and turns.
A recent opinion poll showed that the combined support for Yang and KMT candidate Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順) exceeds that of Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊). Rumors are rife in Kaohsiung that if, by the end of this month, Huang’s support is not higher than Yang’s, the pan-blue camp will dump Huang and switch its support to Yang.
In response to such rumors, KMT Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) traveled south to reassure the public and Huang that the KMT fully supports its candidate and that he is confident she will overtake Yang in the polls.
On the surface, it looks as if Yang and Huang are working together to fight Chen, but in reality, Chen has retreated to the sidelines to watch the other two candidates fight it out.
The main reason the -Kaohsiung mayoral election has become so dramatic is that the candidates view each other from the reference point of their own backgrounds. That is why things have gone so wrong. The KMT hates splits along factional lines, because when someone leaves the party to run on their own, the KMT candidate is certain to lose. Past experience has also shown that regardless of how strong the DPP may look in Kaohsiung and Tainan, a split could also destroy their chances.
Signs that a split was likely within the ranks of the DPP started to appear when the results of the party primaries to select candidates for the Kaohsiung and Tainan mayoral elections were released. This news emboldened the KMT and there were even suggestions that the pan-blue camp could walk away victorious in all five special municipalities.
Tainan Mayor Hsu Tain-tsair (許添財) of the DPP later announced that he would not run as an independent against the party’s wishes while Yang decided to stay in the race as an independent.
As a result, the KMT still felt it had a good chance to win Kaohsiung and started calling for party unity to beat the divided DPP. Some people even predicted a result similar to that involving independent Hualien County Commissioner Fu Kun-chi (傅萁) might happen, though in that case the split occurred in the KMT.
Most pan-green camp supporters vote for the party rather than for individual candidates, which is the exact opposite of the pan-blue camp, where supporters tend to vote for individual candidates. When a politician leaves the pan-green camp, he or she loses the support of the party faithful, including that of the party chairperson. Yang understands this and so after announcing his candidacy, he declared his support for the KMT’s policies in an attempt to contain the DPP.
This was a clear appeal to pan-blue supporters. Although Yang lost pan-green supporters, the KMT has been surprised to find that he has successfully attracted the support of KMT supporters who do not like Huang.
Yang had many vote captains in Kaohsiung County, almost all of them with a pan-green background, but by opposing the party he lost the support of almost all of them. When Yang was asked why he did not adopt a dark green stance — Chen has been called light green — to keep his vote captains, Yang said he would have lost before the election even started if he had followed that path. In other words, leaving the DPP means losing all his vote captains, but Yang believes that following a dark green path, would also fail to attract pan-blue supporters.
Yang’s camp believes that despite losing his pan-green vote captains, he will retain the support of some DPP voters in addition to that from religious circles and corporate leaders. They also believe Yang will be able to leverage his political achievements to win votes from undecided voters, thus bringing his support close to that of Chen.
If the pan-blue camp decides to throw its support behind Yang, he could win the election. Little wonder then that his plans are making both the DPP and the KMT nervous. Both parties have called for no tactical voting.
Yang has made the understandable mistake of viewing the pan-blue camp from his pan-green background, as tactical voting easily occurs in a political environment where people vote for a party rather than individual candidates. However, since most pan-blue supporters vote for individual candidates rather than the party, tactical voting will not be fully effective unless the KMT candidate withdraws, and that is highly unlikely.
Chen Mao-hsiung is a former professor at National Sun Yat-sen University.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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