Former New Taipei City mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) on Sunday broached the subject of populism in a speech at Tamkang University. He had been asked during an overseas trip whether he thought Taiwan was becoming swept up in the global wave of populism. He said that he had answered yes.
When asked later whether he thought Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘), Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate hopefuls, were populists, he said that they were not.
Populism has gained a bad name. Chu is a politician, so it is natural he would not concede that anyone in his party was anything of the sort.
Strictly on the face of it, populism sounds vaguely similar to the basis for democracy, if one defines it as appealing to the needs of the masses as opposed to those of the elite.
The problem with populism is that its arguments only purport to cater to the needs of ordinary people, and rely on simplistic solutions to complex problems and willful distortion of history and the facts, while often seeking to undermine institutions such as the media and judiciary.
In a democracy, there is nothing wrong with championing the will of the majority. However, there remains the need to safeguard the rights of the few.
During the Kaohsiung mayoral campaign last year, Han cast his mind back to a mythical “golden age” when Taiwan’s economy was first among the four Asian Tigers — Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. The truth is that in the post-war period, in terms of per capita gross national product, Taiwan has never been ahead of Singapore or Hong Kong.
Was Han misinformed? Was this a white lie to bolster his narrative? Whatever the answer might be, the result was a distortion of the facts, and therein lies a slippery slope.
The second example involves the words of KMT Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) during a debate on the proposed Enforcement Act of Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748 (司法院釋字第748號解釋施行法), which passed on Friday last week to legalize same-sex marriage in legislation separate from the Civil Code.
Lai, who had submitted an alternative bill on behalf of the Happiness of the Next Generation Alliance, was apoplectic when the speaker’s gavel fell. He said that the interpretation by the Council of Grand Justices had been given more weight than the voice of more than 7.5 million Taiwanese who had, in a referendum in November last year, voted against changing the definition of marriage in the Civil Code.
Lai demanded to know whether the Council of Grand Justices was all that important and accused it of being a pawn of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration — a mere tool being used to further Tsai’s liberal agenda.
First, Lai was willfully distorting the facts. The wording of the referendum was: “Do you agree that the Civil Code should define marriage as the union between a man and a woman?” Arguments against the leading nature of that question aside, the government’s bill did not seek to change the definition in the code, and was thus firmly in line with the referendum result.
Second, yes, the council is really that important, as Taiwan is run according to the rule of law and the Constitution. Lai is betraying his populist tendency of seeking to undermine independent institutions.
Third, his accusation that Tsai has a kind of Machiavellian hold over the council is not only preposterous, it is rich given the KMT’s party-state past, and dangerous, as it is born of malicious intent to fan the flames of social tensions to further his own agenda.
People can come to their own conclusions as to whether Han and Gou have populist tendencies. However, Lai’s performance was just another demonstration of how ugly such a tendency can be.
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