The dust has settled after the Jan. 11 presidential and legislative elections. With a difference of 2.65 million votes between the winner and the runner-up in the presidential election, 14.3 million of Taiwan’s 19.231 million eligible voters decided the national direction for the next four years.
Although President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received a record number of votes — 8,170,231 — it must not be forgotten that Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, received 5,522,119 votes.
These 5.5 million voters might be a bit older and have slightly different views from the majority of voters, but even if their view of whether Han is good or bad might differ from the majority view, 5.5 million votes is still a solid number.
Therefore, Tsai has a responsibility to take a softer approach and show her concern for these 5.5 million voters, to remind voters from two different generations that they all are part of the same family.
Still, there is no denying that Han lost the presidential election and his supporters are not disputing the results.
These are the rules of the game, and for democracy to work, the laws regulating the election process must be acceptable to the losing side. It is no different from someone taking a national test, and — despite working long and hard as they prepare for the test — still failing to pass.
This means that as far as the political parties are concerned, elections are a matter of key performance indicators: If they do not meet the standard, it does not matter how much time they spend on the campaign trail.
Any KMT supporter can verify this cruel reality by asking members of the People First Party, the New Party, the Taiwan Solidarity Union or the Taiwan Action Party Alliance what happens when you do not meet the key performance indicator standards: You get swept into the dustbin of history.
The point for the KMT is this: Has losing the presidential and legislative elections in 2016 and then — despite the fleeting success of the “Han wave” in the 2018 local elections — also losing this year’s elections awakened the party?
Do former KMT chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and the other old guys in the party have any sense of shame at all, staying on until the KMT Central Standing Committee meeting on Wednesday last week before stepping down?
Were they completely indifferent to all the negative criticism that followed as soon as the election results came out?
Do KMT legislators Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安), Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) and Lin Wei-chou (林為洲), KMT Central Committee member Sean Lien (連勝文) and other younger KMT members know that it is not enough to only huff and puff, and complain about the party?
If none of them takes the lead and comes forward to offer themselves up as candidates for the party chairmanship, they are just behaving as if everything is normal while the Titanic continues on its way toward the iceberg.
Another question is whether the members of the youngest generation of KMT members understand that only if they had taken a more forceful approach toward the central party leadership could they have been one of the elected legislators, even if they had not been appointed party deputy secretary-general like Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Deputy Secretary-General Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆), who is of the same generation.
Regardless of whether you agree, the fortunes and misfortunes of Taiwan’s democracy depend on the DPP’s increasingly sophisticated election machinery; clear and powerful agenda; and tight and goal-oriented organization.
The elections that the DPP has lost were not lost because its views on democracy or sovereignty were unacceptable to voters, but frequently because the methods adopted by the party or by members of the party’s supposedly defunct New Tide faction have put people off.
Still, as soon as this electioneering tone calms down, the party is once again able to attract swing voters, in particular those in the 35-to-50 age group who have children to raise and care for their own parents.
Strictly speaking, these people are in even greater need of a stable national direction, but they do not see that the KMT has anything to offer in this respect. It is not a good thing to always bring up the hackneyed cross-strait debate against a backdrop of old, weak people who promote a stale discourse.
It is precisely this sense of being fed up with the party’s central leadership that created Han — who is not part of the traditional KMT establishment — but in the end, voters made it clear that the KMT should not pursue the populist route.
That there is no normal political party in opposition to the DPP’s ideological position means that there is no party capable of monitoring the DPP — and that is Taiwan’s misfortune.
Albert Shihyi Chiu is an associate professor of political science at Tunghai University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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