Saturday’s special municipality mayoral elections resulted in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) winning more seats than the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), but lagging behind the DPP in terms of total votes, by about 400,000 votes.
This showed that neither camp was a clear winner. It also highlighted some inconvenient truths for party politics in the future, as well as possible impacts on each party’s cross-strait stance.
For the DPP, the pre-election hope that it could add one more seat to its two existing seats in Kaohsiung and Tainan was hampered by the shooting of Sean Lien (連勝文), son of former vice president Lien Chan (連戰), and the high voter turnout of 71 percent.
The shooting of Sean Lien the night before the election grabbed media attention and encouraged more staunch pan-blue supporters to come out and vote for KMT candidates, especially in northern Taiwan.
A post-election media poll revealed that 3 percent of voters had switched their votes from DPP candidate Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) to Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌).
Nevertheless, the DPP outnumbered the KMT in its total share of the popular vote by more than 5 percent. This figure is significant because, compared with the 2008 presidential election when President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) received more than 4.5 million votes in the five current or soon-to-be municipalities, the KMT has since lost more than 1 million votes in these constituencies.
In last December’s three-in-one local elections, Ma also lost 1 million votes in 17 counties when compared with the ballots he garnered in 2008. Combining the votes that each party gathered from these two elections, the DPP enjoyed a marginal lead over the KMT; 46 percent versus 44 percent in the national vote. Though some may argue that there is no sufficient and legitimate ground to compare Ma’s 2008 election with these two local elections, it does highlight the decline of Ma’s popularity and KMT support.
These electoral changes could perhaps constrain the pace and the direction of the Ma administration’s future policy toward China. In the face of pressure from Beijing for negotiations on political issues such as a peace agreement, military confidence-building mechanisms and the partial withdrawal of Chinese missiles aimed at Taiwan, Ma has pledged to put aside such issues until he is re-elected and maintain his current strategy of “economics first, politics later” and “easier issues first, hard issues later.”
Despite this, the Chinese have redefined Ma’s “it’s the economy, stupid” statement as indicating there is “no clear separation of economics and politics.”
For the DPP, the inconvenient truth comes in three parts. First, DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) must take advantage of her party’s impressive growth in the city councilor elections and translate it into an effective nomination process for the next legislative elections to break the KMT’s absolute majority in the legislature.
Second, the DPP must be more open-minded when it comes to internal coordination and the rules of the game for its presidential primary. The municipality elections have resulted in a change in the power structure within the DPP. The mayors-elect of Greater Kaohsiung, Chen Chu (陳菊), and Greater Tainan, William Lai (賴清德), have not only consolidated their bases in the two DPP strongholds, but have also broadened the DPP’s territory in the south.
Furthermore, the DPP’s candidate for Greater -Taichung, Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全), campaigned as a wild card and almost beat Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強). His successful attempt to narrow the gap between the DPP and the KMT in Taichung make him a potential running mate in the 2012 presidential election.
Although the DPP candidates in the north lost to their KMT opponents, Tsai and Su Tseng-chang are still the party’s most likely presidential hopefuls for 2012. Other senior leaders, such as former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) and former premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), also have an eye on the seat. It will require good coordination and fair nomination rules to decide who will represent the DPP in 2012.
Finally and most importantly, the DPP leaders need to make the most of the elements of pragmatism, moderation and non-partisanship that they injected into the municipality elections in the party’s future cross-strait debates.
In addition to criticizing the Ma government’s signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) as a move that would hurt the working class, labor unions, citizens in central and southern Taiwan and small and medium-sized enterprises, the DPP must also adopt a more pragmatic and moderate approach. That means developing its own cross-strait policy that strikes a balance between sustaining Taiwan’s sovereignty and forging a normalized relationship with Beijing.
Liu Shih-chung is a senior research fellow at the Taipei-based Taiwan Brain Trust.
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