The most surprising thing that has happened on Taiwan’s political scene recently is no doubt the formation of a force gathering around People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜). The closer one looks at this development, the harder it is to understand what exactly is going on.
The lackluster performance of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his government provides sufficient rationale for Soong to compete in next year’s presidential election, but accusing Ma of incompetence is negative campaigning. Soong needs to be more positive, and so he has raised the notion of breaking the domination of one party, and is going on to effectively monitoring the government and putting an end to disorder in the legislature.
The issue of putting the legislature in order is probably not particularly attractive to hardliners in the pan-blue and pan-green political camps, who are driven by strong feelings of mutual enmity, but it could well attract floating middle-of-the-road voters, so Soong has shown his keen insight by proposing it.
Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) dominates the legislature, and breaking that grip on power is a necessary condition for effectively monitoring the president’s policy performance and ending parliamentary improprieties. It may not be enough on its own.
A deep-blue legislator and political pundit has suggested that, on the contrary, having three parties in the legislature, all holding less than half of the seats, would mark the start of even greater disorder. The pundit in question was starting out from a strongly confrontational standpoint when he said this, but there is some substance to his theory.
For some time during the early-to-mid 2000s, the number of legislative seats held by the governing and opposition parties were quite close. At that time, a handful of very controversial lawmakers with no party affiliation were able to take advantage of the situation to get what they wanted, creating uncertainty and instability in the legislature.
If next year’s election produces a legislature in which there are three main parties, all having less than half the seats, it would give Soong a good chance to get his way by maneuvering between the two bigger parties. That sway could be used to put the legislature in order, but it could equally be used to make it even more disorderly.
The aberrations in Taiwan’s legislature can be traced back to the late 1980s, toward the end of the so-called “10,000-year parliament,” in which most lawmakers represented constituencies in China and never had their seats contested in elections.
These longstanding lawmakers, with their extremely conservative values, stood in sharp contrast to the legislators who had been elected by people in Taiwan to occupy supplementary seats, and so represented much newer public opinion.
That is how the disorder started and the situation has never been set right. Our lawmakers devote their time and energy to confrontation and stunts, while their competence in doing what they are supposed to do — make laws — has gone from bad to worse. Their grasp of legislation is often not even up to the standards of the 10,000-year parliament.
A key reason why the legislature has gone down this path is that, after the system was democratized by making all seats open to election, its rules of procedure and organizational structure continued basically unchanged from the 10,000-year parliament era. A few minor adjustments have been made, but the system has never been radically reformed.
Former presidents Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) saw the legislature’s role as passing the laws that the administration needed and to this end they gave legislators the chance to get pork-barrel benefits for themselves, while letting them drift away from their proper professional role. This resulted in many improprieties, such as legislators only attending committee meetings twice a year; one legislative committee having three conveners; confusion over the questioning of officials, hearing evidence, and investigation; the legislative speaker being appointed by the president; and so on.
Although this kind of system prevailed under the 10,000-year parliament and weakened the legislature, that legislators could retain their seats indefinitely without ever competing in elections made them, in effect, lifetime civilian officials. They were not encumbered by social connections or subject to electoral pressures, so they approached their job as lawmakers with the mentality of civil servants. Under such conditions, at least some legislators applied themselves diligently to the work of formulating laws. Even though the laws they put forward were lacking in democratic values, and even though they passed laws like the Public Functionaries Retirement Act (公務人員退休法) that gave rise to all sorts of problems, at least the process of legislation was of a reasonable quality, in technique, if not in spirit.
When the legislature was democratized by making all seats subject to election, one might have thought that the old system would have been completely overhauled to fit the requirements of a democratic state, but unfortunately that never happened.
The old system was originally created by the KMT and worked to the KMT’s advantage, but its features of pork-barrel benefits and de-specialization still cater quite well to the likings of run-of-the mill legislators, whichever party they belong to. Legislators can devote their energies to seeking the limelight and getting benefits for themselves. They are not burdened with the task of fulfilling their proper duties as lawmakers. That is why the old system remains basically intact.
If the forthcoming election can end the KMT’s dominance, it will be a once-in-several-decades chance to change the course of history. It is in view of this historic opportunity that the Democratic Progressive Party has placed former premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) at No. 18 on its list of nominees for at-large legislative seats — outside the top 16 that are considered “safe.” This gesture demonstrates the party’s determination to win more than half the seats, so as to be in a position to push through parliamentary reforms.
Now Soong, too, has seen the possibility that the KMT may win less than half the seats and has gone so far as to talk about ending disorder in the legislature, but his idea of how to achieve this seems to be by acting as a lever between the pan-blue and pan-green parties. Although this gives Soong a chance to show his skill in maneuvering, it does not amount to halting the disorder.
Maybe Soong is not yet sure how he intends to reform the legislature and will put forward more specific demands when he has thought them through.
The only person who can tell us for sure is Soong himself.
Lin Cho-shui is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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