The nation's two biggest parties, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), are suffering from "primary-phobia."
President Chen Shui-bian (
In the KMT, Acting Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (
In democratic countries, presidential elections are administered according to party politics. Party members in the US must only state their intention to run and form an exploratory committee, and are then forced out if they fail to garner enough popular support or funding. In state primaries, candidates without hope of receiving enough votes are also eliminated. The rules are transparent, simple and fair. Losers normally accept defeat and only rarely run as independents, which is equivalent to committing political suicide.
The KMT and DPP each have a primary system to select candidates, but both parties seem petrified of heading down that road. As there is always some favoritism during party primaries, the rules of the game are not necessarily fair. For example, the DPP doesn't poll pan-blue supporters, and the KMT amended the "black gold exclusion clause" in its Constitution specifically for Ma. Candidates can also resort to dirty tactics, as when Ma's camp accused Wang of representing corruption during the last KMT chairmanship election, or they might not have a complete commitment to the democratic process, as when former DPP chairman Hsu Hsin-liang (
Most of these factors have nothing to do with the system but are instead related to people. Despite this, the primary election system is being made the scapegoat for destroying party unity. Remember, however, how Hsieh, after having lost the DPP's Taipei mayoral primary to Chen in 1993, became Chen's campaign manager, thus turning electoral competition into a show of party unity and clearly proving that the problem is people, not the primary election system.
Intra-party compromise is not necessarily a bad thing if it pitches candidates against each other in open debate so that the weaker candidates can be eliminated and intra-party competition simplified. That does not mean that parties should treat primaries as a dangerous beast best avoided, as is the case in the KMT, whose candidates have neither the sincerity nor the guts to talk face-to-face, but instead rely on mediators who may take advantage of their position to advance their own interests, which results in private struggles behind closed doors.
A party that lacks both the wisdom to hold face-to-face negotiations and the guts to fall back on a primary election will be spurned by voters and doomed to a life in opposition.
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