Compared with his overwhelming victory by 2.2 million votes four years ago, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was this year re-elected by a much narrower margin of 790,000 votes. Moreover, voter turnout for the presidential poll as well as the gains and losses made by parties for legislative seats in different areas were in keeping with the established voting pattern in which the north supports pan-blue parties while the south supports their pan-green rivals.
The locations where parties succeeded in maintaining or increasing their share of the vote are those where they control the local government, and this consolidation raises the threat of political division and conflict between different regions. Although Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) lost the presidential election, she succeeded in raising her party’s political culture to a new level of rational debate and peaceful competition.
On learning of his win at the Jan. 14 presidential poll, Ma said that it was a victory for Taiwanese and for a program that seeks clean government, peace and prosperity.
However, there is more to the outcome of the presidential election than the obvious regional distribution of votes; it also reflected the diverse demands of different social strata.
During the course of the candidates’ campaigns, business corporations filled newspaper columns with big advertisements calling on readers to vote for their favorite candidates. Less visible was the reality of a growing gap between rich and poor. Wealth distribution is just as important as economic prosperity in affecting people’s perceptions and the country’s happiness index.
Policies that favor big businesses can only lead to Taiwan’s economic structure leaning even more toward social class polarization.
One of the focuses of the Ma campaign was to attack the corruption of former DPP president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁). However, that merely served to highlight Ma’s inability to carry out his own policies during his first term in office. As president, Ma has so far wasted the high expectations that voters once had of him.
He also wasted his Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) large majority in the legislature, which would have been invaluable in pushing through reforms. Instead, he ended up exploiting Chen’s questionable legacy to win at the polls.
Ma failed to convince voters that he would speed up the pace of reform over the next four years, or that his executive team would desist from using the state as a cash machine and overcome institutional waste and inertia.
Fighting to be re-elected with few political achievements to talk about, Ma had to rely on blasting Tsai with a hard-hitting, intense and pervasive advertising campaign, along with carefully coordinated moves made by judicial and executive departments. This is just the kind of thing that Ma and his campaign manager, King Pu-tsung (金溥聰), are good at, but it is nothing new to the DPP, which was originally formed out of the opposition to authoritarian rule.
There has been no shortage of raw material with which to bash the KMT, be it Ma’s failure to live up to his 2008 campaign pledges, his party’s considerable assets and notorious corruption, the so-called “1992 consensus” or the way that Taiwan’s [ROC] national flag gets hidden away whenever Chinese officials come to visit.
These are all examples that reveal the real Ma behind his political rhetoric, and they could have provided ample fodder for the DPP to go on the offensive. Instead, however, it found itself on the receiving end of attacks throughout the campaign.
The KMT repeatedly pressed the DPP on the subject of cross-strait issues, which it perceives as the party’s weak point. In response, Tsai fostered the idea that cross-strait issues are not just a matter of sovereignty, but also of how to deal with China’s ascent, the effects of which include closer interaction and fiercer competition between China and Taiwan across the Taiwan Strait and in the global arena.
Tsai determined that the DPP needed to establish more comprehensive and detailed policy positions, and not wait for differences in behavior and values between Taiwanese and Chinese to produce comparisons and clashes as they interact.
With the KMT exerting not just the full strength of the party, but also its influence in government and the armed forces to launch an all-out assault, Tsai chose to respond with a simple narrative that appealed to both reason and emotion.
Her response can be seen as a declaration of the style to be followed by a new generation of DPP leaders. Since her election as party chairperson in 2008, the DPP, which had hitherto been a highly ideological party prone to emotional clashes, Tsai has injected sought to embrace community politics, which is more closely connected with people’s daily lives.
Now that Tsai has announced her resignation as DPP chairperson, the party faces the task of choosing a new leader. However, it has few choices as to the way in which its political line will develop.
The single-member constituency system has become a source of power in the legislature, blurring the roles of legislators and local councilors to the extent that there is now considerable overlap between the two.
The subtle relationship between economic and political power emerges in the course of handling community affairs, fostering community consciousness and developing community enterprises. These developments are not just a starting point for the DPP to make a comeback in northern cities, but also for it to deepen and consolidate a new direction for agricultural production, the environment and life in general in central and southern areas.
Taiwan today is trailing in last place among the four Asian “tiger” economies. Carefully selected economic statistics can no longer conceal society’s widening contrasts and sharpening contradictions. Although the DPP remains in opposition, it still has to face and deal with tough questions about how economic, trade and political interactions across the Taiwan Strait are influencing the country’s social development and the fairness of wealth distribution.
Only by deepening its community roots and extending its influence from the bottom up can the DPP overcome the dominance of the KMT and its pan-blue allies in northern Taiwan.
Liu Dsih-chi is an associate professor in Asia University’s Department of International Business.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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