KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
After carefully reading the recent political commentaries on the pan-blue integration, I found that there was no lack of complex analyses. Unfortunately, many people seem to have forgotten that the election will be decided neither by Lien, Soong and their party officials nor by the parties' elected officials. It will be decided by the voters.
Therefore, the success of the Lien-Soong cooperation lies in whether they can fulfill people's needs, not in whether they can eliminate dissent within their parties. Therefore, Lien and Soong should rely less on political tactics and they should take basic popular expectations into account. They should make political appeals that directly touch people's hearts in order to attract pan-blue electors and the middle-of-the-road voters.
To put it bluntly, the public is tired of politicians' meaningless and ambiguous political ramblings. Since Lien and Soong want to be allies, they should act and talk in a straightforward manner, taking today's overall situation into consideration in order to move the people.
The opposition's wants to run in the election to regain power -- because it considers itself superior to the ruling party and thinks it can serve the public better. Who would be interested in seeing Lien and Soong waste the media's and the public's time with their posturing, if the two do not come up with satisfactory plans and continue to chatter about things of insignificance in a roundabout way?
As the Chinese saying goes, "The fighting spirit aroused by the first roll of drums is weakened by the second and exhausted by the third" (一鼓作氣，再而衰，三而竭). The result of next year's election will be predictable if the pan-blue supporters run out of patience with the two parties.
The pan-blue politicians still do not understand one thing -- that the rise and fall of a party is not decided by politicians' subjective will. Thanks to democracy, this nation's electors have long been able to decide whether to support a party or not. Isn't the New Party's rise and fall a good example? For the public, what's any party's existence or negotiation mechanism got to do with them?
A party, regardless which one it is, should always behave itself as it serves the public. Those politicians in the spotlight should not act in a bureaucratic way. They should act like a president or a future president, and should never speak in a cavalier fashion.
"Is politics really that simple?" you may ask. Think back to December's Kaohsiung mayoral election. The pan-blue camp's negotiation [for the nomination] were complex and political observers' election analyses were insightful. What was the result of the election? Was it decided by the politicians, political observers and academics, or by the voters?
Hu Yu-wei is a professor in the Graduate Institute of Mass Communication at National Taiwan Normal University.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
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