Much depends on whether the KMT will do well enough this coming Saturday for its chairman, Lien Chan (連戰), to keep his job. Until recently, and officially even now, the KMT hopes and believes that it will win more seats than any other party and be able to ally with its pan-blue friends to force the president to hand the authority to appoint the Cabinet to the opposition. This is what lies behind Lien's repeated calls for "following the Constitution."
Even Lien, with the bluntest political antennae on the island, seems to understand that this is now a pipe dream. For one thing, there is no unity in the pan-blue camp; James Soong's loathing of Lien has became embarrassingly apparent. For another, the KMT's election campaign appears to be running into trouble. The message that only the KMT can fix the economy is not being bought; the "stability vote" -- the votes of those who just want the chaos to end -- goes by default to the party of government, now of course, the DPP; the fierce crackdown on vote-buying is hurting the KMT's voter mobilization and a goodly proportion of voters prefer the real KMT principles of People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) to the pathetic attempt by Lien to cloak his own lack of direction and vision in the so-called glories of the KMT's past.
The assumption now appears to be that Lien will indeed have to go. Certainly the fight has begun to pick over the party's carcass. Last week we saw overtures to Soong to return to the party; yesterday we saw an extremely wacky piece of political theater as KMT legislative candidates Chen Horng-chi (陳鴻基) and Chen Hsueh-fen (陳雪芬), accompanied actors imitating President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Lien Chan, and walked down a red carpet between KMT headquarters and the Presidential Office to symbolizing the need for cooperation between the two major parties.
Here we see the two sides of coming intra-party strife maneuvering into position. On one side will be the residual Taiwan firsters, who will claim that Lien's repudiation of Lee Teng-hui's (
If the Taiwan firsters win then there is no reason why they could not work successfully and productively with the DPP to regain the kind of consensus politics that Taiwan used to know under Lee Teng-hui. That of course would be an ideal situation, but whether it is achievable after Lien's reregistration drive has so radicalized the party faithful -- in the wrong direction -- is open to doubt.
The worst scenario of all would be for the KMT to do well enough for Lien to keep his job. Then we would have a continuation of KMT obstructionism with perhaps a KMT-PFP demand to form the Cabinet. Probably the president would rather see a no-confidence vote on the premier followed by a dissolution of the legislature and another election. In this scenario the DPP would probably gain, as many Taiwanese realized that the way out of political turmoil was to give the government the power to govern.
Only one thing is certain. The results on Saturday night will only decide starting positions in a contest for power that could take months to resolve itself. It is as well that the new legislature does not begin sitting until February next year. Hopefully by then, some of the fog of battle might have cleared.
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