With less than a month until the Jan. 11 presidential and legislative elections, voters and political observers are putting their own unique interpretations on the results of the latest opinion polls. An interesting fact has emerged from the polls: Supporters of Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, are on average older than Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) voters.
The DPP’s legislative candidate for Tainan’s fourth electoral district, Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲), made a direct appeal in a message on an online bulletin board to the youth vote, calling on “young Taiwanese” to come out and vote.
It is a subtle, but important shift: Previously, the party’s candidates have appealed to the “public” to come out and vote.
The election campaign initially coalesced around the central issue of opposing and resisting China, but has recently taken on an additional core theme: the younger generation rebelling against the politics of their parents and grandparents.
In previous elections the generation gap between voters has not been a significant factor. What has changed this time?
The pension reforms enacted by President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration have alienated many civil servants, teachers and members of the armed forces, and led to numerous protests.
However, young voters view the protests with a degree of disdain, because they are not beneficiaries of a pension system that has provided their parents with a generous standard of living in retirement. Young people question why they are being asked to shoulder a heavy burden that their parents never had to.
Han’s campaign team has registered the displeasure of civil servants, teachers and the military, and decided to pursue their votes by pledging to “amend” the government’s reforms.
At the beginning of the year, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) delivered a speech titled “Letter to Taiwanese Compatriots,” in which he attempted to capitalize on the pan-green camp’s setback at the local elections in November last year.
Tsai’s robust rejection of Xi’s message went down extremely well with the younger demographic on social media platforms, including Facebook and Taiwan’s Professional Technology Temple bulletin board.
We are witnessing the exclusion of the older generation from online spaces inhabited by Taiwanese youth.
There is also the issue of marriage equality. After Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) took office, the government began to engage with the issue, which culminated in May in the amendment of the law to legalize same-sex marriage, which has enabled the DPP to win over a large number of new younger voters and locked in the party’s core youth vote.
In contrast, Han’s decision to stand in the presidential election, despite having served less than half of his term as Kaohsiung mayor does not look good, while his frequent off-the-cuff, ill-thought-out policy announcements, which have quickly been torn to pieces under the glaring spotlight of traditional and social media, have turned him into the butt of many a joke among young Taiwanese.
As a result, a diminishing number of young voters are willing to cast their ballots in favor of Han and the KMT.
As we enter the closing stages of the election campaign, Tsai’s and Han’s camps are hoping that their opponent would suffer from a low voter turnout and are doing everything they can to motivate their supporters to come out in force. Both camps know that intergenerational differences will also play an important part in this election.
Marvin Yang is a graduate student.
Translated by Edward Jones
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry