After nearly four years of rebuilding a party that in 2008 had been reduced to a pale shadow of itself, former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has good reason to worry about the direction the party seems to be taking since she stepped down.
While Tsai, for various reasons, failed in her bid to unseat President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in the Jan. 14 election, she demonstrated her vision and maturity as party leader, a role she had assumed on May 20, 2008, the day Ma was first inaugurated.
On that day, few people would have thought that the DPP, after suffering resounding defeats in the legislative and presidential elections, and hit by scandals surrounding former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), could, a mere four years later, again present a credible challenge to Ma and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Tsai accomplished just that, giving hope to many that the KMT would not go unchallenged in what are challenging times for Taiwan.
All those accomplishments are being threatened now by a party leadership battle that appears to have lost all sense of purpose and direction. Since Tsai stepped down as chairperson on March 1, the DPP has fallen into disarray, unable to propose any clear policies, while constantly resorting to all-out attacks against Ma and his policies.
This reflex action was taken to an extreme when DPP legislators announced they would seek to recall Ma with little more than a week left in his first term in office.
Although Ma’s popularity has fallen to record lows in recent weeks following a series of bungled policy proposals, the only thing that the pan-green camp achieved with its recall motion was to unify the KMT, which, facing a crisis of its own, was starting to show cracks in its foundations — including legislators jumping ship on important votes in the legislature.
Had the DPP acted with caution and maturity on the matter, if only by limiting itself to protests, the disunity within the KMT could have widened, which in turn would have allowed the pan-green camp to reach out to potential allies within the pan-blue camp. Now that opportunity seems lost and the pan-blue camp, seeing its leader under siege, has rallied around, scuttling any chance of credible, interdenominational pressure on the president and the executive.
Furthermore, by acting in this manner, the DPP is sounding like a sore loser and telling us that rather than rebuild itself — as it did over the previous four years — following its defeat in the January presidential election, it would resort to desperate measures, which is what the recall attempt certainly was.
As for the voices within the pan-green camp who, looking at Ma’s low popularity rating, argue that if an election were held today the DPP would win, they are missing the point altogether. Opinion polls are not elections and how one responds to each is contingent on very different considerations. Disliking Ma does not automatically translate into not voting for him and his party.
Ma’s unpopularity at the moment is the result of several things, a combination of ineptitude, yes, but also the necessity to make difficult decisions, such as raising fuel and electricity prices. Choices that the DPP, had it prevailed in January, would also likely have had to make.
For the future of this nation, the pan-green camp must abandon such self-defeating strategies, which can only alienate the various segments of the polity that it will depend on if it is ever to run the Presidential Office again. Let us hope that whoever is voted the next DPP chairman has the wisdom and ability to ensure that desperation does not aliment the party’s behavior.
An outrageous dismissal of the exemplary Taiwanese fight against COVID-19 has been perpetrated by the EU. There is no excuse. I presume that everyone who reads the Taipei Times knows that the EU has excluded Taiwan from its so-called “safe list,” which permits citizens unhindered travel to and from the countries of the EU. As the EU does not feel that it needs to explain the character of this exclusive list, perhaps we should examine it ourselves in some detail. There are 14 nations on the list that have been chosen as safe countries of origin and safe countries of destination for
Filmmakers in Taiwan used to struggle when it came to telling a story that could resonate internationally. Things started to change when the 2017 drama series The Teenage Psychic (通靈少女), a collaboration between HBO Asia and Taiwanese Public Television Service (PTS), became a huge hit not just locally, but also internationally. The coming-of-age story was adapted from the 2013 PTS-produced short film The Busy Young Psychic (神算). Entirely filmed in Taiwan, the Mandarin-language series even made it on HBO’s streaming platforms in the US. It is proof that a well-told Taiwanese story can absolutely win the hearts and minds of hard-to-please
Drugged with sedatives, handcuffed and wearing a bright orange prison tunic, British fraud investigator and former journalist Peter Humphrey was escorted by warders into an interrogation room filled with reporters, locked inside a steel cage and fastened to a metal “tiger chair.” Humphrey recalls: “I was completely surrounded by officers, dazed, manacled and with cameras pointing at me through the bars. I was fighting for my life like a caged animal. It was horrifying.” Footage from the interrogation was later artfully edited to give the appearance of a confession and broadcast on Chinese state media. While this might sound like an
The US House of Representatives on July 1 passed by unanimous consent a bipartisan bill that would penalize Chinese officials who implement Beijing’s new national security legislation in Hong Kong, as well as banks that do business with them. The following day, the US Senate unanimously passed the bill, which was later sent to the White House, where it awaits US President Donald Trump’s signature. The bill does not spell out what the sanctions would look like and Trump has yet to sign it into law, but Reuters on Thursday last week reported that five major Chinese state lenders are considering
RSS