The curtain has dropped on the presidential and legislative elections. They have produced Taiwan’s first female president, the third transfer of power in the history of Taiwan’s democracy and the first ever Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) majority within the legislature. Even more significant, Taiwan’s political landscape has shifted, thoroughly shaking up the old blue-green political divide.
Since the election of the second legislature in 1992, there have been two rotations of power within the history of Taiwan’s democracy. The political makeup of the legislature has up until now always been extremely stable, with the pan-blue camp enjoying a permanent majority over the pan-green camp. However, following the impact of the Sunflower movement and the nine-in-one elections in 2014, the pan-blue political bloc — for so long viewed as rock solid — has been slowly losing its grip on power. The utter rout of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in the elections has produced a seismic shift in the traditional blue-green structure of Taiwanese politics.
What is the cause of the KMT’s devastating defeat? What happened to the KMT’s support, in the short space of just a few years, to cause the party to lose such a huge number of voters?
The root cause of the KMT’s meltdown is due to two factors. First, the performance of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration failed to gain the approval of voters. Second, the central ideas of the KMT have drifted off course so that the party gradually became disconnected from mainstream public opinion.
The KMT has in the past been supported and sustained by a stable political bloc: a network of grassroots organizations that the party was able to mobilize and that up until now have played a crucial role in the success of the party. These organizations can be divided into local factions; local party branches; military personnel, civil servants and public school teachers; military veterans and the Hakka community.
The patron-client relationship that used to exist between the KMT and local factions during the past authoritarian era disintegrated a long time ago and the mobilization network of interpersonal relationships within local factions themselves also gradually fell into decline. Furthermore, the KMT’s network of local party branches that used to be so strong, following a succession of cuts, now lack both money and manpower. During the election campaigns, local party officials lacked not the will, but the resources to do their job.
In addition, following two changes of central government and the DPP’s long-standing control of many towns and cities, the military-civil servant-public school teachers group are no longer the rock-solid KMT vote that they once were, and KMT support among retired people has also melted away following the successive shrinking of pension benefits over the years.
In addition, the traditional military veteran group is slowly withering away as an influx of outsiders into the veterans’ villages over the years has caused this once cast-iron KMT vote to gradually rust away.
Finally, as to the Hakka vote, aside from the Kaohsiung and Pingtung region that turned green long ago, the Hakka population in Hsinchu and Taoyuan has also fallen away in recent years due to hard work from the DPP’s local operations. The Taoyuan result in the legislative elections is the perfect example of this phenomenon: the DPP won three of the city’s six legislative seats.
Another phenomenon worth examining is that traditional KMT voters are largely made up of middle-aged to older voters, whereas support for the party has always been low among young and first-time voters. Further, after the Sunflower movement and the dispute over changes to the high-school curriculum, support for the KMT among young voters melted away like snow under the hot sun. With its traditional support base gradually withering away, and unable to carve out a new source of support, the steady shrinking of the party’s voting bloc has become a seemingly unstoppable trend.
The question now is if the KMT will be able to rise from the ashes, promote a new generation of leaders and recapture the presidency.
First, recapturing the presidency requires new leaders, which leads to a series of crucial questions: Where are those new leaders to be found? Can they find their own version of president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文)? Should the chairmanship really be returned to the older membership in their 1960s and 1970s rather than to someone younger?
Second, there is the issue of a new generation of leaders: Faced with future competition from other political parties and the promotion of a new leadership, there is a vast talent gap, not to say vacuum, separating the current leadership and the younger generations. Is the KMT really going to continue to look for “talent” among its old leaders, losers and local factions? One cannot help wondering if there will even be a KMT in 2020 if the party loses another large swathe of the electorate in the nine-in-one elections in 2018.
The elections brought a huge shift in Taiwan’s blue-green political landscape, but perhaps this traditional view of Taiwan’s political landscape will be come apart and be completely rebuilt in the not-too-distant future. We can only wait in anticipation to find out of the political development will bring a new and better world.
Wang Yeh-lih is a professor of political science at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Edward Jones and Perry Svensson
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