For the past six years, the pan-blue and pan-green camps have been engaged in a bitter war of attrition.
The two sides have mutually incompatible platforms and ideologies and each has a large power base — either informally, legally or illegally.
Both camps have direct or indirect control over one or more branches of government. The Constitution was designed for a foreign country in 1911 and in the legislature the government is chosen by the head of state, regardless of whether they are from the majority or minority party.
At least two branches of government are either operationally paralyzed or inactive, while the budget for this fiscal year has yet to be passed.
The country has recently gained and lost diplomatic relationships — one each. The judiciary, meanwhile, has been politicized by both camps for strategic and party-promotional purposes.
In the legislature, bills are knowingly written or made conditional upon a concession unacceptable to the other side and, as a result, the government has been unable to effectively use the legislative process to enact its manifesto and fulfill its mandate.
The former leader of the largest opposition party, the president and the president's wife have all been accused of corruption in a climate of lawsuits fueled by speculative media reports and tit-for-tat retaliatory accusations.
One external country claims sovereignty over Taiwan and has threatened to attack while the world's largest (yet fading) superpower ambiguously influences the dispute, furthering its own geo-strategic goals.
One side has a strategy of not tolerating any development which might lead to the establishment of a sustainable native polity, yet in their actions may lie the slow death of the Old Republic and with it, any remaining justification for their own ideology.
The other side uses legal and extra-legal means to make any change, however cosmetic, that will legislatively, culturally or environmentally build the foundations for hegemony in what it regards as a transition period into a new Taiwanese Republic.
Like the opposition, it too has not been able to resist the lure of corruption, which itself could be described as having been almost institutionalized.
Without effective and comprehensive resolu
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