Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) is today to launch the Taiwan People’s Party (台灣民眾黨), which he said would provide voters with an alternative to the binary “blue vs green” battle in next year’s presidential election.
While Ko has not yet announced a presidential bid, he apparently plans to use the party as a springboard for one later this year. The odds might be in his favor in one respect: The Taipei mayoralty is traditionally a stepping stone to the presidency, with three of Taiwan’s four directly elected presidents having served as Taipei mayor. However, Ko must overcome a number of challenges, foremost of which would be getting his party off the ground. Creating a political party from scratch with no polling data or established channels of funding is no small matter — and with the presidential and legislative elections less than six months away, Ko has no time to waste.
However there are several examples of “disruptive” political movements that prove it can be done: French President Emmanuel Macron founded the centrist En Marche! party in April 2016. A former investment banker and relative political outsider, Macron rapidly assembled a grassroots youth movement and used advanced digital tools to help focus his campaign. By May the following year he had won the presidency with a landslide 66.1 percent of the vote.
More recently in the UK, the Brexit Party, led by Euroskeptic politician Nigel Farage, romped to victory in May’s European Parliament election just six weeks after its official launch. The party effectively combined a simple messaging strategy — “Change politics for good” — with a sophisticated social media campaign and crowd-sourced funding from an army of small donors.
However, Ko’s greatest challenge might be keeping his fiery tongue in check: His notoriously caustic rhetoric has the potential to derail a presidential campaign. Ko has labeled Taiwanese politicians “liars and fraudsters” and in May raised eyebrows after saying that the Holocaust was the “greatest publicity” for Jews internationally.
Ko yesterday made the explosive claim that while President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) is not corrupt, “everyone around you is knee-deep in graft.”
Ko would also need to shake off a perceived pro-China bias. Backed by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) when he ran as an independent in the 2014 mayoral election, Ko’s relationship with the party and pro-independence voters cooled after he said that “both sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family” in a speech at a Taipei-Shanghai forum in 2015.
Last month, Ko told a reporter that he is “not exactly pro-China,” adding that Taiwan’s best strategy is to remain neutral in the power struggle between the US and China.
Ko could provide further ammunition to the DPP’s claim that he is too close to China. Hon Hai Precision Industry Co founder Terry Gou (郭台銘), who lost the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential primary to Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), has not ruled out collaborating with Ko, as well as with former legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平).
If Ko were to bring Gou and Wang on board, it would make it possible for his party to not only split the “pan-blue vote,” but also hoover up floating voters concerned about the economy.
Meanwhile, “pan-green” voters disappointed with the DPP’s record would be more sympathetic to Wang’s brand of “nativist” politics.
The DPP underestimates Ko at its peril: He has proven himself to be a savvy political operator. Were he to form a triumvirate and combine this with a positive vision for the nation’s future, he could be a formidable force.
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