A media organization recently published the results of an opinion poll regarding the candidates who are to run for Yilan County commissioner in the local elections on Nov. 26, with only 2 percent of respondents saying that they would vote for the Taiwan People’s Party’s (TPP) candidate. Even among respondents who identified with the TPP, only 2 percent said that they would cast their ballot for the party’s candidate.
In comparison, Yilan County Commissioner Lin Zi-miao (林姿妙) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), who is seeking re-election, garnered the support of 71 percent of respondents who identified with the TPP.
A similar picture emerged for the Taoyuan mayoral race. A separate media poll published at the end of last month showed that only 27 percent of respondents identifying with the TPP said they would vote for the TPP’s candidate, while former premier Simon Chang (張善政), the KMT’s candidate, had the support of 49 percent of those who identified with the TPP.
These results show a number of trends:
First, apart from the TPP’s chairman, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), no TPP candidates have the support of the majority of respondents who identify with the party.
Second, Ko’s cynicism toward President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) government and her Democratic Progressive Party — not to mention his mockery of both — plus the relative similarity between Ko’s cross-strait policies and those of the KMT have pushed people who identify with the TPP toward strongly rejecting the DPP and other pan-green parties, so that few of them lean toward the green end of the political spectrum.
Third, the TPP only recently came into existence. As such, it has few core values, nor are its members bound by revolutionary sentiments. People who identify with the TPP seem to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to elections — they would rather vote for KMT candidates who have a strong chance of winning than for their own party.
It looks as though TPP candidates in the mayoral and county commissioner elections will not only fail to act as “mother hens” who can consolidate votes for their party, but they will be sidelined by strategic voting among TPP supporters. Such an outcome would reinforce the TPP’s image as a one-person party focused on Ko himself, which could be the start of its downward spiral.
Huang Wei-ping is a former think tank researcher.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
RSS