The limits of Taiwan’s Constitution are being severely tested.
With the “Bluebird movement” last year and the mass recall campaign earlier this year, it is clear that a significant number of voters are frustrated with the Legislative Yuan, controlled by the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party.
The Democratic Progressive Party, under the leadership of President William Lai (賴清德), has refused to respond to what it sees as a ruthless tactic aimed primarily at hobbling the government.
The Executive Yuan has refused to countersign amendments to the revenue-sharing law, while the legislature is to discuss a motion to impeach Lai.
At the root of these developments is a confluence of two factors. The first is the Constitution, which is a patchwork of contradicting legal ideals and political compromises. The second is the rising trend of polarization amid global uncertainty.
The Constitution — implemented in 1947 and amended seven times in Taiwan from 1991 to 2004 during a phase of accelerated democratization — is a mix of European parliamentary ideals, Sun Yat-sen’s (孫逸仙) thoughts and US political practices.
The original Constitution featured a president selected by a body of delegates to act as a figurehead “mediator.” The head of government was vested in the premier, who had to be approved by the Legislative Yuan.
After decades of rule under Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), the president came to be seen as the highest seat of political power. As such, popularly electing the president became the goal for the democracy movement in the 1980s and 1990s.
As the president became directly elected in 1996, Taiwan contended with how to divide power and accountability between the president, the premier and the legislature. Through a series of compromises, the system evolved to what it looks like today: a patchwork.
That framework is the result of a gradual process that minimized social upheaval and sought consensus in small steps. In other words, Taiwan’s piecemeal constitutional structure is a price paid for a peaceful transition to democracy — a transition better than a violent one, but that still came with costs.
Checks and balances between the legislative, executive and judicial branches in Taiwan are shoddy at best. The system has fundamental contradictions.
The president is popularly elected with a mandate to govern, but can only do so through their appointed premier. The premier answers to the legislature, but cannot dissolve the legislature on their own. The legislature oversees the premier, but has no power over their appointment.
Crucially, there are no effective veto or veto override powers between the executive and legislative branches.
In any system, some room for interpretation is necessary to allow for flexibility and applicability in unforeseen situations, but it also leaves room for abuse. Taiwan’s constitutional crises are testing the edges of the system.
Why not change the Constitution? It is commonly believed that after the 2004 amendments, the threshold needed to amend the Constitution was made so high — requiring approval by more than half of the electorate in a referendum — that amendments are all but impossible.
That was more than 20 years ago. The threshold is high, but as the stakes are even higher maybe it is time to ignite the imagination of the Taiwanese body politic to create a system that works.
Yeh Chieh-ting is a director of US Taiwan Watch, a think tank focusing on US-Taiwan relations. He is an adviser to the International Taiwan Studies Center at National Taiwan Normal University and is the founder of Ketagalan Media.
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