The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Saturday elected a new chairman. It might not be an occasion for celebration and rejoicing, but one cannot help but wonder if it is possible that the nation’s biggest opposition party is about to face sweeping changes following a chaotic situation in the legislature.
During the review of a draft for the Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program, New Power Party (NPP) Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said that he would give deep and serious consideration to the issue of how to go forward, adding that he was questioning the meaning of remaining in the legislature.
This is an issue that applies to all opposition parties: How will they go forward from here?
Hubertus Buchstein, a professor of political theory and history of political ideas at the University of Greifswald in Germany, has been studying the crisis of democracy.
He says that the gap between democratic participation and the formation of rational decisions is growing wider.
When participation does not bring the expected results, the parliamentary opposition becomes weaker and unable to provide feasible alternatives and this turns parliamentary debate into a mirror game: The parties might differ in name, but they are in fact mirror images of each other.
In this situation, election campaigns become beauty contests and elections deteriorate into mere formalities.
Colin Crouch, a British sociologist and political scientist, says that democratic systems might be formally complete, but the political process has changed, and the influence of small and privileged minority elites is constantly growing, suppressing the equality project that has been part of the democracy movement ever since its first beginnings.
This leads to political corruption, the mediatization of politics and its evolution into entertainment as the decline of politicians is replaced by the growing influence of “experts.”
The process can be seen throughout the world and the result is that voters are turning to authoritarianism.
They are doing so in the hope that it will create a stronger and fairer democracy that is “closer to the public” and will create a government apparatus providing a depoliticized administration that is not dominated by experts, but more in line with demands for a more output-oriented democracy that strives to provide a more effective democratic model that meets demands for fairness, justice and the public interest.
Surprisingly, they still call this “democratic politics.”
The answer is of course not to move toward authoritarianism, but neither is it a democracy that relies solely on political decisions and consensus politics.
While democracy should strive to produce legitimate decisions — such as Taiwan’s need for forward-looking infrastructure — it must not be forgotten that legitimate participation and process is just as important.
Being an opposition party is not a struggle between loyalty and confrontation. Rather, it is about being a political force that is capable of providing different answers and a different way of looking at the world — in short, being capable of presenting a different position from the governing party.
The opposition parties in the legislature must not adopt a one-sided, single-minded communication strategy that turns them into anti-political tools for whatever reason — immoral, moral or aesthetic. If that happens, the nation will be left with political chaos.
Lin Chia-ho is an associate professor at National Chengchi University’s College of Law.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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