Last week, the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Central Executive Committee again decided to postpone the start of the party’s presidential primary from Friday to May 22.
The start date was originally deferred by a week to accommodate President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) eight-day state visit to three diplomatic allies in the Pacific.
Now there has been a second change to the timetable, yet this negotiated deferment is five times longer than the previous one.
Several questions come to mind: Is this latest postponement a ruse by one candidate to stall for time to improve their chances? Or perhaps it is a cunning scheme to keep kicking the can down the road until the road ends?
Will this additional delay enable differences between the two camps — and their supporters — to be put aside to unite the party? Or will it further exacerbate already entrenched positions and perhaps even tear the party apart?
Last year’s elections for the party’s Central Executive Committee and Central Review Committee degenerated into a similar two-horse race.
Will its presidential primary also follow this pattern so that it becomes a stage-managed stitch-up between big-name candidates?
It feels as though the DPP, having successfully reinvented itself, has once again fallen into the trap of protecting the president at all cost, tossing aside procedural norms.
The rules of the game are being changed and then changed again to suit the incumbent: Tsai.
It is not a good look for the party.
Tsai has previously said that she is willing to work with anyone. If the primary process is really just seen by the party’s upper echelons as an irritating distraction and simply a way to select a No. 2, then they might as well rename the whole process a “vice presidential primary.”
What is this talk of the “burden of the incumbent” and the ridiculous notion that the current president should be given priority?
This argument simply does not hold water. If the incumbent sports an exemplary record in office, what exactly is their burden? Why grant them priority?
If the incumbent has performed poorly, the electorate’s priority is to replace them. If the party decides to go against the will of the people in this way, it would be political suicide.
Another question is whether DPP supporters — especially the more diehard among them — would continue to “vote through their tears” should the party keep up its unseemly behavior.
The party is pretty quickly going to run out of distance to run if it continues to hold its own supporters hostage in this shameful manner.
Behind all this are the heart-rending scenes of woeful, desolate party supporters.
In Chinese, there is a saying that “there is nothing sadder than a withered heart.”
Has the party not heard of electoral fatigue? Fool the people once, shame on you. Fool them twice, thrice, four times, shame on them.
After a while, such behavior becomes routine, it becomes habit, it becomes ingrained.
For now, the party’s supporters might continue to “vote through their tears.”
How long before they weep, but decline to vote?
How long before they weep and waste their ballot or — Heaven forbid — vote for the opposition through their tears?
Chang Kuo-tsai is a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors.
Translated by Edward Jones and Paul Cooper
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