In the campaigns running up to tomorrow’s special municipality elections, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has tried to transform its electioneering tactics, veering away from the traditional ideological campaigns that were prevalent under former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁). The best example of this new tactic is the DPP’s use of the Internet to direct its campaign rhetoric at the Web-savvy younger generation, which typically refrains from voting.
Taipei mayoral candidate Su Tseng-chang’s (蘇貞昌) campaign headquarters in downtown Taipei is a prime example of the DPP’s new direction. His technology-heavy office is more reminiscent of the Taipei International Flora Exposition’s Pavilion of the Future than a center of politics. DPP candidates elsewhere have also turned to rock concerts and popular culture to woo younger voters. However, despite this shift, the party hasn’t quite gone far enough.
In local elections, the key factor for voters, especially swing voters who are undecided until election day, is what a candidate says he or she will do to improve their daily lives. Campaign platforms in municipal elections should focus on such mundane topics as cleaning street gutters, improving traffic lights, building more bicycle paths, fixing broken street signs or improving and building parks. Those are the issues that touch the lives of swing voters, not ideological divides between the pan-green and pan-blue camps, scandals involving municipal projects, presidential politics, international affairs and whether or not an opponent was born locally.
The DPP’s candidates have spent too much time and effort attacking their Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) opponents and too little on how they would improve the municipalities they wish to govern. Su focused many a comment on Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) possible involvement in the Xinsheng Overpass scandal. DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) attacked her KMT Sinbei mayoral opponent Eric Chu (朱立倫) for allowing pollution to flow into Taoyuan County rivers when he was county commissioner. In Taichung, DPP mayoral candidate Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) criticized Taichung Mayor Jason Hu’s (胡志強) nine years in office, saying he hadn’t improved the crime situation, as demonstrated by a recent scandal involving police and gangsters.
In all of these examples, there was too little focus on what the candidates plan to do if they win and too much focus on the negative attributes of their opponents.
Another issue DPP candidates should have de--emphasized is their belief that this election would serve as a referendum on President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) policies. The majority of swing voters in these elections are thinking about issues that are closer to home, not about whether Ma is selling out their future. They will be voting for somebody who will build a better place for them to live and work, not somebody who will concentrate on repealing the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement.
Most importantly, they are voting for officials to lead their own governments, not for somebody who makes their stance against or for China clear. This is not a referendum on the president, it is a referendum on how well people think the DPP or the KMT can govern.
Of course, it’s now too late for the DPP to change its tactics. All it can do is hope its final mix of events directed at younger voters, coupled with traditional electioneering activities, will sway residents in those municipalities where the party might have a chance of turning the tide against the KMT.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs