The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), an old political powerhouse, is likely to be forgone by Taiwanese voters in January, and so the time has come to ponder how to replace the outmoded thinking and work styles in the legislature if the nation’s democracy is to be consolidated.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has just celebrated its 29th anniversary. Although it does not have a long history, the party, during the slow process of gaining political resources, has unavoidably gotten itself entangled — to a certain extent — in the old custom of back-scratching politics.
“We do not need to cover ourselves with mud, because we already stand in the mud. It is not a person who we want to defeat, but the difficulties that we face at present,” DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said in a campaign video.
Did it occur to her that the “mud” is the result of decades of back-scratching politics? If it is the DPP’s goal to move democracy forward and make Taiwan a better nation, it has to take on the role of reformer and transform the political world from back-scratching to civic politics.
All political considerations necessarily involve legal, rational and emotional factors. So-called back-scratching politics refers to a political environment in which personal relations are prioritized. This is not to say that personal relations must be entirely abandoned in politics, but that it should be given less importance — at least to the degree that it is secondary to the law and to reason so that its ramifications are minimized.
In contrast, civic politics is the political environment in which reason is prioritized and used to convince the public: A work is done because it is right, not because it serves to return a favor. Newcomers to the political world, be they groups or individuals, should be careful not to get themselves caught up in the muddy morass of back-scratching politics and should do their best to foster the development of civic politics.
Legislative candidates from the New Power Party (NPP) and the DPP have been in competition with each other. The parties are bickering over who owes who in regard to the Sunflower movement last year, a clear indication of a severe back-scratching mentality, which says: “If someone owes someone else a favor, that someone should back off when the other desperately wants something.”
It sets a bad example of prioritizing people over systems. Despite some members of the NPP being important decisionmakers in the Sunflower movement, neither those individuals nor the party can represent the student-led movement. In addition, from a systemic point of view, DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) is just a representative of the DPP, so why does he get to take all the credit?
After opinion polls showed that more than 60 percent of Taiwanese were opposed to the service trade agreement with China and 500,000 members of the public took their disapproval of the agreement to the streets on March 30 last year, the pact was still not withdrawn.
Instead, a bill on an oversight mechanism for cross-strait agreements, which was drafted by the Executive Yuan based on the premise of “one country, two areas” and does not really oversee anything, is about to be passed. The special regulations for free economic pilot zones — about which the public have serious doubts — have been quietly pushed directly to a second reading in the legislature through unfair means.
Before the DPP can unite the Taiwanese to stop the KMT — which has caved in to the Chinese Communist Party — from cooperating with Beijing in its plan to annex Taiwan, the DPP should refrain from taking undue credit or showing pride in themselves.
On the other hand, whether Ker could take credit for his contributions during the Sunflower movement has nothing to do with NPP legislative candidate Chiu Hsien-chih (邱顯智), who was not directly involved in the decisionmaking process last year.
In back-scratching politics, the focus of attention is always the people and not what really needs to be discussed, which are the problems within the political system.
Is not the suspicion of improper influence between Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) and Ker the ultimate expression of back-scratching politics in the legislature? Both men had for a long time been in charge of negotiations between the KMT and the DPP, thereby gaining enormous political assets, which indirectly led to the allegations of misconduct.
The caucus discussions — which have stirred a lot of controversy — are not necessarily secretive, but what really requires careful examination is whether to abolish or remodel secretive discussions and change the situation, in which power is concentrated in the hands of a few.
In nations where civic politics is fully developed, the public does not allow the use of political assets gained at the expense of the public to be used to an individual’s advantage.
For Taiwanese democracy to make progress, a new way of thinking must formulated and momentum must be built up through next year’s legislative elections, while discarding outdated mindsets and back-scratching practices. The public expects new blood and new ways of getting things done in the legislature.
Leung Man-to is a political science professor at National Cheng Kung University.
Translated by Ethan Zhan
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