Six years ago, Barack Obama was elected president of the US on the back of promises for change. The defeat of Obama’s party, the Democrats, in last month’s US midterm elections means that it will be difficult for him not to be restrained by the Republican majority in the US Congress over the two years he has left in office.
Now a lame-duck president, Obama may show congressional leaders a willingness to compromise, and use presidential executive orders to guarantee his place in history, but political problems are now unavoidable. This reveals a great risk of creating a divided government as a result of the confrontation typical of the US presidential system.
Looking at Taiwan, it is difficult to come to the direct conclusion that the governing party’s defeat in the Nov. 29 elections should lead to the government stepping down and the Cabinet being reshuffled in response to changes in public opinion.
According to the Constitution, it is not possible to force President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to step down, and he has been able to rely on political expedients such as sacrificing the premier and appointing a new one that is not even favored by the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) legislators. This kind of “sacrificial politics” is unclear on rights and responsibilities, and this lies at the heart of the political crisis that Taiwan has been unable to resolve.
Many people say that the Constitution stipulates that when the president and the legislative majority represent different political parties, the system should shift toward a Cabinet system, although that never happened during former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) time in office.
They also believe that when the president and the legislative majority represent the same party, the system should shift toward a presidential one to maintain political stability. However, since Ma took office, the political situation has descended into chaos, even though the KMT has had a constant legislative majority.
Studies show that whether it is the US’ presidential system or other similar ones, presidentially-centered systems often create problematic political confrontation. Even if Taiwan were to reinstate the legislature’s right to approve the premier, that might not do much to fix confrontation.
Under the current system, the president can fall back both on the legitimacy offered by direct, popular election and on the protection offered by office term regulations. With such a strong mandate, systemic shifts are not as easy as they might sound.
Taiwan’s premiers are not leaders of the majority party that have been made members of the legislature through popular election under a Cabinet system. This leaves the question of what incentives there are for the president to share power with the premier.
In other words, the premier comes from outside the legislature and lacks all democratic legitimacy. In practice, the president’s decisionmaking power is based on popular support, but the premier is responsible for executing those decisions. The president does not have to be involved in policy implementation and the Constitution stipulates that the premier, who only has limited decisionmaking powers, is accountable to the legislature for policy implementation. This clearly runs counter to the democratic principle of balance between power and accountability.
Even if the president and legislative majority represent the same political party, euphemistically described as “complete power, complete accountability,” Taiwanese realities mean that there is frequently a lack of the checks and balances that should be provided by a division of powers.
The president can use the popular support expressed through his or her election together with party resources to control the party’s legislators, thus weakening or perhaps even ignoring the checks and balances that should be provided by the legislature. This was made evident by the “September Strife” last year and the Sunflower movement’s occupation of the Legislative Yuan’s main chamber earlier this year.
Following the recent elections, the legislature could of course choose to propose a vote of no-confidence in the premier as stipulated in the Constitution and ask the president to dissolve the legislature and call new elections. However, the legislature has rarely had the guts to try to bring down the Cabinet. Furthermore, the premier’s resignation following the KMT’s defeat in the elections created a situation in which there was in effect no Cabinet to bring down.
No political party should be allowed to escape responsibility for the difficult constitutional situation following last month’s elections. As legislators from both the ruling and opposition parties are now taking the opportunity offered by proposing constitutional amendments to set up a constitutional amendment committee, they should consider the possibility that the focus should be not on the constitutional system, but rather on how to meet the requirements of balancing power and accountability, as well as clarity and concision.
Political parties should learn to compromise in the constitutional sense and abandon their selfish winner-takes-all mentality. This is the only way to create constitutional expectations among the public and take the first step on the road toward a sincere, joint rewriting of the Constitution.
Liu Ching-yi is a professor in the College of Social Sciences at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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