Autonomy key to township elections debate

A comprehensive package to ensure local autonomy is more important than the debate over whether or not to abolish elections for township and village leaders, scholars and reform-minded politicians say.

The Executive Yuan has made abolishing the elections one of its top policy goals.

Last week, Premier Yu Shyi-kun instructed the Ministry of the Interior to submit a new proposal within three months to end elections at the township and village level.

The change, when put into practice, would mean that the nation's townships will be administered by government appointees, starting -- at the earliest -- from 2006.

Under the planned revision, the levels of Taiwan's government will be reduced from three to two, namely the central government and the city and county governments.

The Cabinet believes that eliminating local elections would improve administrative efficiency and help stamp out bribery linked to elections. It is also believed a total of NT$19.3 billion in public expenditure could be saved in this way.

The Cabinet proposed a bill to revise the Law on Local Government Systems (地方制度法) during the last legislative session, but the legislature failed to pass the bill into law.

Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘), a senior DPP lawmaker, said that KMT colleagues had obstructed the bill's review and that the DPP would continue to push for its passage.

Critics, however, said that the DPP's main purpose to abolish the elections is to undermine the political muscle of local factions in townships, most of which are controlled by the KMT.

The KMT, which won 194 of 319 seats in the Jan. 26 poll, has objected to doing away with the elections, maintaining that the elections serve as a measure of grassroots opinion.

"We prefer to keep the elections because halting them is anti-democratic," said Tseng Yung-chuan (曾永權), a senior KMT lawmaker and deputy executive director of the party's Policy Committee.

Tseng added, "eliminating the elections can't weed out money politics in Taiwan but will only deprive the people of their right to participate in politics."

Scholars and politicians from other political parties, however, hold different opinions.

Chen Ming-tung (陳明通), a political analyst at National Taiwan University, noted politicians at the township and village level constitute the KMT's power base.

"That explains why the party has refused to surrender its weapons," he said.

PFP legislator Chou Hsi-wei (周錫偉) agreed to abolish the elections.

"Personally, I support the idea of abolishing the elections, since we don't need so many elections and some townships chiefs are very corrupt."

He added he did not think that ending a specific election would be anti-democratic.

Chou said the central government should redraw the administrative districts before it decides to halt the elections, since there are gaps between Taiwan's 319 towns and villages in terms of population and territory.

Since 1997, former president and KMT chairman Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) has lent his support to abolishing the elections.

Lee has said that he believes the measure would help eradicate Taiwan's "black gold" politics.

Scholars, however, have said the move would make it impossible to preserve the autonomy of towns and villages.

The central government should look into the issue from the perspective of how to ensure local autonomy rather than the existence of the elections alone, they said.