With less than a month until the Jan. 11 presidential and legislative elections, voters and political observers are putting their own unique interpretations on the results of the latest opinion polls. An interesting fact has emerged from the polls: Supporters of Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, are on average older than Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) voters.
The DPP’s legislative candidate for Tainan’s fourth electoral district, Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲), made a direct appeal in a message on an online bulletin board to the youth vote, calling on “young Taiwanese” to come out and vote.
It is a subtle, but important shift: Previously, the party’s candidates have appealed to the “public” to come out and vote.
The election campaign initially coalesced around the central issue of opposing and resisting China, but has recently taken on an additional core theme: the younger generation rebelling against the politics of their parents and grandparents.
In previous elections the generation gap between voters has not been a significant factor. What has changed this time?
The pension reforms enacted by President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration have alienated many civil servants, teachers and members of the armed forces, and led to numerous protests.
However, young voters view the protests with a degree of disdain, because they are not beneficiaries of a pension system that has provided their parents with a generous standard of living in retirement. Young people question why they are being asked to shoulder a heavy burden that their parents never had to.
Han’s campaign team has registered the displeasure of civil servants, teachers and the military, and decided to pursue their votes by pledging to “amend” the government’s reforms.
At the beginning of the year, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) delivered a speech titled “Letter to Taiwanese Compatriots,” in which he attempted to capitalize on the pan-green camp’s setback at the local elections in November last year.
Tsai’s robust rejection of Xi’s message went down extremely well with the younger demographic on social media platforms, including Facebook and Taiwan’s Professional Technology Temple bulletin board.
We are witnessing the exclusion of the older generation from online spaces inhabited by Taiwanese youth.
There is also the issue of marriage equality. After Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) took office, the government began to engage with the issue, which culminated in May in the amendment of the law to legalize same-sex marriage, which has enabled the DPP to win over a large number of new younger voters and locked in the party’s core youth vote.
In contrast, Han’s decision to stand in the presidential election, despite having served less than half of his term as Kaohsiung mayor does not look good, while his frequent off-the-cuff, ill-thought-out policy announcements, which have quickly been torn to pieces under the glaring spotlight of traditional and social media, have turned him into the butt of many a joke among young Taiwanese.
As a result, a diminishing number of young voters are willing to cast their ballots in favor of Han and the KMT.
As we enter the closing stages of the election campaign, Tsai’s and Han’s camps are hoping that their opponent would suffer from a low voter turnout and are doing everything they can to motivate their supporters to come out in force. Both camps know that intergenerational differences will also play an important part in this election.
Marvin Yang is a graduate student.
Translated by Edward Jones
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