The Baseball World Cup has shifted the public's focus away from the unfocused election campaign. No one cares what the ruling or opposition parties say about the "1992 consensus," or a future Cabinet.
The outstanding performance of Taiwan's baseball team has not only provided a feast of high-quality baseball, it has also given us a temporary escape from the economic recession and the chaos of the elections. It has unified Taiwan to root for a national cause.
Such are the joys of baseball. Elections, by contrast, seem to leave people feeling more and more sad. Like a baseball tournament, an election is a battle of strengths within an arena. But it lacks human interest and the joy of participation.
It's a matter of life and death between candidates, a game of verbal attack and abuse in which political opinions are marginalized and replaced by defamatory and negative rhetoric.
People are left groping in the dark, guessing. If they happen to elect a good person, they feel lucky; if they elect a bad one, they simply grin and bear it. Hypocrisy is rife and elections seem to turn democracy into a gamble. The parties are only interested in stabilizing political power to make their own election plot look reasonable.
Despite the rhetoric, party leaders want to ensure power, to capture the ultimate prize at the next presidential elections.
They promise they will deal with the ailing economy, which is what people really care about, but this is not what the candidates focus on when elected.
How politicians make good their promises, however, is not the main point of elections. What saddens people is that elections usually involve the mobilization of ethnic groups, repeatedly splitting popular feeling between unification and independence.
The ruling party's instability and the opposition's unreasonableness since the transfer of power have left people feeling disappointed. Moreover, the frequency of elections, at enormous social cost, is numbing and wearying.
They expose the dangers for Taiwanese democracy. Compare elections to professional baseball a few years ago. Gambling scandals reduced the popularity of the game. People lost faith in the fairness of the competition and didn't get any pleasure out of it. So they stayed away from the games. Enthusiasm for baseball was turned into indifference by the gambling of the game's players.
Thanks to efforts to eliminate gambling from baseball, fans are once again returning to stadiums to support the national team. Even though there is a world of difference between baseball and elections, the same reasoning applies to the question of how a fair victory is achieved.
As people turn from indifference to elections to enthusiasm for baseball, there is cause for both great celebration and grave concern: celebration at the resurgence and unifying influence of baseball; concern because when people should be participating in elections, they are instead diverting their attention to the baseball. When elections become meaningless and political parties the public's enemy, will politicians still be able to turn a blind eye?
Wang To is a DPP legislator.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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