When Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫) was elected to the KMT’s chairmanship, he was considered by many as a reformer. When he was nominated as the party’s presidential candidate, he was regarded as some sort of a savior.
However, his performance during the past week shows that he is actually far less than what people expected.
Chu took over the chairmanship in January, following the KMT’s rout in last year’s nine-in-one elections. At the time, he was considered a reformer, as he promised to rebuild the party to win the trust of voters again, while vowing to resolve the controversy over the party’s illegally obtained assets. The deadline that Chu set for resolving the party assets issue passed in July, yet the issue remains.
Last week, Chu emerged as a savior when the KMT’s extraordinary national congress almost unanimously voted to rescind the nomination of Deputy Legislative Speaker Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) as the party’s presidential candidate; and with all the delegates standing up and applauding, Chu was nominated as the KMT’s new presidential candidate. Chu stood on the stage and held his hands up as the delegates cheered, as if he had already won the election.
However, his savior image immediately began to fall apart when he started his acceptance speech. Chu said although he had promised not to enter the presidential race, he eventually decided to take on the task, because he could not sit and watch as the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) moved to win both the presidency and a legislative majority, warning that such a case would lead to a “one-party autocracy.” He went on to question if voters would feel safe about letting “a political party that has been on the streets protesting” govern the nation.
Such remarks show that Chu still has not grasped the true meaning of democracy.
A single party holding both the presidency and a legislative majority is nothing new in democracies. If Chu truly believes in the democratic constitutional system, he should not worry about it, because if the DPP does something that fails to meet the public’s expectations, it would be abandoned by voters in the next election and the KMT would stand a greater chance of coming back to power.
Interestingly, Chu has repeatedly said that he supports changing the constitutional system from a semi-presidential system to a full parliamentary system. If he truly supports the parliamentary system, he should know that one of the most important features of the system is that the party that commands a legislative majority is the party that also gets to form the government.
Chu might need a reminder that in the past seven years, as well as during most of the time since the party’s arrival in Taiwan, the KMT has controlled both the executive and the legislative branches of the government.
Perhaps what Chu really meant to say was that it is democratic when the KMT controls both the executive and the legislative branches of the government, but not when the DPP does.
Chu has been complaining about investigations that are looking into the legality of the KMT’s swap of presidential candidates, calling it a waste of judicial resources and saying that even though DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) is single, she should understand the trouble that an investigation would bring to a suspect and their family.
The remarks might implicate that Chu, being a leader and a presidential candidate, does not respect the judiciary and is so careless that he did not realize what he said might have insulted unmarried people.
It has only been a week since Chu was nominated, and apparently he is just another old-fashioned, narrow-minded, reactionary politician.
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