We have now moved into the new year, and Taiwan has mounting challenges both external and internal. Evidently, even with the fresh start of the opening days of 2025, little is going to change.
According to a new poll, President William Lai’s (賴清德) approval rating is more than 50 percent, and the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) approval rating is evenly matched with that of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) opposition.
Despite this, the KMT and the TPP are saying that together they represent the majority of the public, and in the Legislative Yuan continue to force through votes, pass legislation aimed at accumulating more power for the legislature, and propose controversial legislation, prioritizing this over legislation designed to help ordinary Taiwanese or the government’s annual budget.
The storm whipped up over the corruption allegations brought against former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has only provided more political ammunition for the KMT and TPP to attack the DPP.
From the moment the results of last year’s presidential and legislative elections were known, everyone realized that we were in for a rough ride. The structural reasons lay in the failure of the KMT and the TPP to come to an arrangement to share the presidential and vice presidential ticket, preventing them from winning the presidency together, and yet the combined number of seats in the legislature gave them a legislative majority with which to exert pressure on the ruling party.
At the same time, under the leadership of the TPP’s legislative caucus leader — now acting chairman following Ko’s resignation — Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), who harbors enmity toward the DPP, the eight TPP legislators have all but surrendered their autonomy to KMT legislative caucus leader Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁). In the process, they have disregarded their own sense of what the right thing to do is, or the needs of national security, and have thrown themselves fully behind the KMT’s agenda. The eight legislative seats held by the TPP “white” camp are now being referred to as the “little KMT blue” seats.
Ko’s travails have only consolidated the fate of his TPP to be part of Fu’s gang.
Huang, for his part, has adopted a strategy of political conflict over regard for due process of law. Following Ko’s detention, he has let it be known that he intends to set TPP supporters against Lai. KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) immediately voiced his support, saying that his party was “resolved to oppose the ‘green autocracy’ and protect Taiwan’s legislative justice.”
On Tuesday last week, Yilan County Commissioner Lin Zi-miao (林姿妙) of the KMT was sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison for corruption. Former vice premier Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) of the DPP is also fighting corruption allegations. Even though Cheng has been granted bail, he had to repeatedly fight for it. The DPP has not voiced any support for Cheng while his case has been ongoing, and neither has it accused the judiciary of unfairness.
In contrast, Huang, having been elected as acting party chairman, has clearly decided not to reflect on the matter and work to contain the damage to the party by taking the spotlight and shining it squarely on the Ko corruption case. Instead, he has doubled down on slogans shouted at street demonstrations, calling for TPP supporters to take aim at Lai. He has not only brought disrepute to the doctorate in law that he was accorded by Cornell University, he has also tied the future of the TPP to Ko’s fate.
It is regrettable that Chu, who has repeatedly tried to present himself as a regular guy who can be trusted, has shown favoritism to a party member found guilty of corruption, thereby showing that there really are not any “regular” people in the KMT, from its leadership down to its lieutenants.
More egregiously, it seems that Huang and Chu have failed to mention that Ko’s corruption charges originated in accusations from an elected representative in the pan-blue camp, or that Lin’s corruption case was first brought by a politician from the white camp. Instead, they are trying to pin this on Lai as the hand orchestrating judicial corruption from the shadows, accusing him of “political persecution” and labeling him as the leader of the “green terror.”
For opposition parties to combine forces to oppose the government is normal in party politics. However, the political battles must be done within the democratic system and following laws, regulations and conventions, and cannot be fought with scant regard for national security.
The actions by the blue and white camps would ultimately weaken Taiwan’s national defense and the central government’s finances, and destroy the constitutional structure of five branches of government. At the same time it would remove the public’s right of recall and paralyze the Constitutional Court.
Their actions, so destructive to the operation of state institutions, are being spearheaded by Fu, a controversial figure who has made it to the top of the KMT’s legislative caucus, aided and abetted by Huang, who is consumed with hatred for the DPP.
The attempts to expand the power of the legislature being orchestrated by the opposition are aimed at making the legislature more powerful than any of the other branches of government. Given their legislative majority, this blue-white power grab would effectively make the KMT and the TPP, together, the ruling party. This is why there has been repeated pushback from the Constitutional Court, which has ruled that the proposed changes are unconstitutional.
The blue and white camps responded by elevating the problem, first by pushing through amendments to the Constitutional Court Procedure Act (憲法訴訟法) and second by rejecting the government’s judicial nominees in an attempt to emasculate the court and prevent it from constraining unconstitutional behavior.
The other amendments that the KMT and TPP have forced through are similarly based primarily on partisan interests.
The amendments to the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) require the central government to redirect more than NT$375 billion (US$11.4 billion) to local governments, but the amount to be allocated to KMT and TPP-led local governments far exceeds the amount to be given to DPP-led local governments.
This completely disregards that many government initiatives involve regions covered by multiple local governments, neither does it take into account how the central government is to make up the shortfall in its own budget, or how it would impact national policy implementation.
Most egregiously, central government expenditure in areas such as national defense could be slashed by 28 percent, making it difficult to continue with plans already decided upon or ongoing.
These include the NT$294.5 billion already allocated for national defense, the NT$122 billion needed for labor insurance, NT$40 billion for rental subsidies and NT$3.46 billion for measures to boost the birthrate.
If the government opts not to reduce national defense spending, the budgets for other initiatives would have to be cut by as much as 37 percent: The amendments to the budget allocation law would seriously undermine the central government’s ability to proceed with infrastructure and national defense projects, and seriously deplete national welfare and health insurance payments.
Meanwhile, the budget allocation to local governments would increase by a considerable amount, which on the one hand might be commandeered to shore up the political power of local government heads or, on the other, be used on grandiose construction projects that serve little purpose and ultimately become nothing more than disused buildings breeding mosquitoes. In short, it would lead to a pointless waste of national resources.
If the blue and white camps do not alter the strategy they embarked upon last year and continue to push these bills that would weaken Taiwan, it would lead to a disaster for the nation.
The two parties’ strategic alliance is based upon enmity for the DPP. The political confrontation between the KMT and the TPP on one side, and the DPP on the other, is not happening as part of checks and balances within democratic governance, and is being done solely to annihilate the rivals’ ability to function.
Another major reason is that the KMT, which was exiled to Taiwan after being defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in China in 1949, and the TPP, which has taken its name from the party founded by Taiwanese democratic pioneer Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水) during the Japanese colonial period, continue to train their firepower on the pro-Taiwan localization government. The victims in all this would ultimately be all Taiwanese.
Unfortunately, this white-blue-on-green war is only going to continue. How to stop this train wreck from happening, which could easily lead to an existential crisis for Taiwan, is something that not only the DPP government, but the nation as a whole, needs to pay serious attention to.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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