Hacks in charge of Taipei
Green camp party members and big beasts alike have been trying to persuade the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) central command and President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to put forward a nominee from their own ranks for next year’s Taipei mayoral election, not just because of the rather poor performance of Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) thus far, but also because Ko is simply not on the same page as the DPP.
Yao Li-ming (姚立明), who served as Ko’s campaign manager, has predicted that, were the DPP to nominate Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) as its candidate, Ko would be lucky to get more than 100,000 votes. Ko, then, is currently under fire from all sides, and his path to a second term as Taipei mayor is fraught with difficulties.
Frankly, what Ko will be thinking right now revolves not around the game theory “prisoner’s dilemma” --— that is, whether to work with his captors or against them — it is more like deciding whether to engage in a game of chicken with the DPP.
The game of chicken is a contest in which two cars drive at full pelt toward each other. The driver who, just at the moment of impact, loses their nerve and swerves to the side to avoid collision is the “chicken,” and loses.
The worst-case scenario is where neither is willing to give and both are killed in the ensuing crash. In another scenario, one driver chooses to be chicken to save his skin, but this would mean their opponent takes all.
The sure winner is the contestant capable of showing themselves to be utterly fearless to the point of irrationality, leaving their opponent with no doubt that they are prepared to take them down and that they have no intention of being “chicken.”
Ko will be all too aware that, unless he pulls something impressive out of the bag over the next two years, he is going to be hard pressed to come away with even Yao’s modest prediction of votes. He is unlikely to want to be seen as chicken, and will likely be hoping that the DPP contest the election, turning it into a three-way race between him, the DPP candidate and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. That way, the KMT would win by a split green vote and save Ko from the inevitable rout he would suffer if he went head-to-head with the KMT.
A game of chicken between Ko and the DPP would end in both losing.
The DPP’s considerations should be how to get more than half of the Taipei electorate to come out on the day and cast a loyalty vote and then make sure that it runs the city well and does not leave it in the hands of political hacks with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement who will run the city into the ground.
Fang Fu-chuan
Taipei
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