The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on Wednesday announced that it would put off its presidential primary until May 22, saying that it had been unable to mediate between President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and former premier William Lai (賴清德).
The delay comes despite Lai saying that he has no interest in becoming Tsai’s running mate, but prefers the primary process to democratically decide the nominee for next year’s presidential election.
Delaying the primary and pushing to strengthen Tsai’s position questions how committed her supporters are to party unity. Several key DPP figures have said that protecting Taiwan’s democracy and sovereignty, and blocking China from annexing Taiwan rely on a strongly united party capable of regaining voter confidence.
A Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation poll released on March 25 found that 55.1 percent of respondents supported Lai, while 26 percent supported Tsai. With a sampling of 1,073 adults, perhaps the poll’s numbers are not representative of the population, but the party should determine as soon as possible who would truly be its strongest candidate.
Transfers of power between the DPP and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), as well as the outcome of the nine-in-one elections on Nov. 24 last year, shows that voters are often not loyal to a particular party. The worry for some is that if Tsai is nominated, Lai supporters might vote for an independent candidate or abstain, rather than vote for Tsai.
The postponement of the primary prompted long-time DPP member Michael Tsai (蔡明憲) to renounce his membership, citing Tsai Ing-wen’s failure to promote “Taiwanese nationalism,” seek UN participation or employ partial conscription — advice he claims to have given her since she took office in 2016.
Tsai Ing-wen’s ineffectual implementation of transitional justice and judicial reform have resulted in “alienation and anxiety” among Taiwanese, he added.
The standoff over the primary has forced Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) to try to put out fires to limit the extent of a party split. On Saturday, he urged DPP members to remember the hardships that were overcome to allow an indigenous party to emerge.
However, if the party cannot determine its strongest candidate and generate support for that nominee, there is little that Su or anyone else could to keep it from failing at the polls.
Su knows this, but on Saturday, when he said the delay would allow the party to see who will be the KMT’s candidate before selecting its own, he seemed to get distracted from the real issue, especially as the KMT has announced its own delay.
Each party clearly hopes to see the other’s cards before playing its hand, but the DPP does not need to get hung up on what the KMT will do.
The KMT has already given it some wonderful gifts: the talk about signing a peace treaty with China and Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) allegedly making sneaky deals during his trip to Hong Kong, Macau and southern China last month.
The DPP only needs to rally behind its strongest candidate, target the KMT’s China-centric plans and assure voters that it will not allow the nation to become a special administrative region of human-rights-violating China.
If party’s primary indicates that the public wants Tsai Ing-wen to stay in office, that is fine: nominate her. If it shows that the publc prefers Lai to run, the DPP will gain nothing by insisting on putting Tsai Ing-wen on the ballot.
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
When it became clear that the world was entering a new era with a radical change in the US’ global stance in US President Donald Trump’s second term, many in Taiwan were concerned about what this meant for the nation’s defense against China. Instability and disruption are dangerous. Chaos introduces unknowns. There was a sense that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might have a point with its tendency not to trust the US. The world order is certainly changing, but concerns about the implications for Taiwan of this disruption left many blind to how the same forces might also weaken
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
On today’s page, Masahiro Matsumura, a professor of international politics and national security at St Andrew’s University in Osaka, questions the viability and advisability of the government’s proposed “T-Dome” missile defense system. Matsumura writes that Taiwan’s military budget would be better allocated elsewhere, and cautions against the temptation to allow politics to trump strategic sense. What he does not do is question whether Taiwan needs to increase its defense capabilities. “Given the accelerating pace of Beijing’s military buildup and political coercion ... [Taiwan] cannot afford inaction,” he writes. A rational, robust debate over the specifics, not the scale or the necessity,
RSS