When the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lost the Miaoli by-election on March 14, many considered it a minor blip for a party that has enjoyed uninterrupted electoral success since the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) era began in 2005 with his stint as party chairman.
Many pundits blamed the defeat on the party’s poor performance at the national level, but a more likely explanation for the Miaoli defeat was the party’s overconfidence. Instead of choosing a candidate well-known for his or her commitment and hard work in the local community, in a hat-tip to everything bad about Taiwan’s politics, the party plumped for the wife of the deposed legislator, who had lost his seat after being found guilty of vote buying.
Kang Shih-ju (康世儒), passed over by the KMT for the nomination, promptly left the party and ran as an independent, winning despite the efforts of two-thirds of the party’s legislators.
Nerves jangled by defeat, it now seems the KMT is worried about losing tomorrow’s by-election in Taipei’s Da-an District (大安).
As in Miaoli, the KMT faces a direct challenge from another pan-blue candidate: The New Party’s Yao Li-ming (姚立明) is running as an independent.
While the New Party is no longer an electoral force, its strong anti-corruption platform could appeal to pan-blue constituents infuriated by the behavior of the former holder of the seat, Diane Lee (李慶安), who flouted the law for 14 years by hiding the fact that she had dual nationality.
The worst-case scenario for the KMT could see Yao split the pan-blue vote with the KMT candidate and pave the way for a shock Democratic Progressive Party victory. Low turnout of a disappointed KMT faithful could also result in the loss of one of the party’s strongholds.
A second defeat in two weeks would turn the blip into a minor crisis.
So, up steps the Central Personnel Administration (CPA), which on Tuesday took the unusual step of calling on civil servants living in the constituency — of which there are many — to make sure they vote tomorrow.
Although not unprecedented — government bodies made similar announcements during the KMT’s previous spell in government — the CPA’s announcement is quite clearly a clarion call to a traditionally pro-KMT section of society to do their bit for the party’s cause.
The CPA has defended the move by saying that it only asked people to vote. But if it was worried about turnout, why didn’t it do the same thing before the Miaoli election, where only around 50 percent of those eligible voted?
If the KMT thinks it can save electoral face and make everything right by ordering people to vote, then it is barking up the wrong tree because it is just this type of arrogance that is the party’s growing problem. Five decades of unchallenged power helped the KMT develop an air of entitlement, and since its return to power this regrettable trait has come to the fore once again.
If the KMT loses tomorrow in an election where it faces no real competition, then it will only have itself to blame. It has to realize that arrogance and complacency are not winning formulas in a democracy.
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
Media said that several pan-blue figures — among them former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), former KMT legislator Lee De-wei (李德維), former KMT Central Committee member Vincent Hsu (徐正文), New Party Chairman Wu Cheng-tien (吳成典), former New Party legislator Chou chuan (周荃) and New Party Deputy Secretary-General You Chih-pin (游智彬) — yesterday attended the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. China’s Xinhua news agency reported that foreign leaders were present alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) is expected to be summoned by the Taipei City Police Department after a rally in Taipei on Saturday last week resulted in injuries to eight police officers. The Ministry of the Interior on Sunday said that police had collected evidence of obstruction of public officials and coercion by an estimated 1,000 “disorderly” demonstrators. The rally — led by Huang to mark one year since a raid by Taipei prosecutors on then-TPP chairman and former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) — might have contravened the Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法), as the organizers had
RSS