The latest poll released by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation (台灣民意基金會) is not great reading for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) or its chairwoman, Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文).
The poll shows an increase of 7.3 percentage points to 38.4 percent in support for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) compared with 20.6 percent for the KMT, down by 5.2 percentage points from the previous poll.
Some KMT members say the results have been distorted by the foundation chairman Michael You (游盈隆), whom the DPP administration nominated as chairman of the Central Election Commission on Dec. 22 last year.
According to a My Formosa online poll, from September to November last year, the DPP’s approval climbed 4.4 percentage points to 39.9 percent from 35.5 percent, while its disapproval rating dropped 2.2 percentage points to 49.9 percent from 52.1 percent, representing an overall improvement of 6.6 percentage points. In the same period, the KMT’s overall rating fell 6.5 percentage points. The foundation’s findings are consistent with a longer-term trend identified in a separate poll.
Former KMT Youth League deputy director Ting Yu (丁瑀) on Wednesday held a news conference at KMT headquarters in Taipei, criticizing Cheng for blaming President William Lai (賴清德) for the “Justice Mission 2025” military drills around Taiwan, saying that Cheng should instead have called out the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its military intimidation. Ting had been supportive of former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) campaign for the KMT chair last year. However, Hau lost to Cheng.
KMT Legislator Wu Tsung-hsien (吳宗憲), acting head of the party’s Culture and Communications Committee, said that every KMT member had the right to their own opinion, but that the party stood behind Cheng.
This is important, because of what it reveals. The KMT’s flagging support in the polls can be read as a readjustment after last year’s “mass recall” movement that hurt the DPP, an advantage that the KMT fudged as a result of its own destructive chair campaign last year.
That campaign was so fractious with fighting between the respective candidates and their supporters that it damaged the KMT’s image. The electorate saw an organization that had lost discipline and self-restraint. The end of the election should have been the beginning of unity, but the infighting continued, and this has translated into a fall in voter confidence.
Ting’s news conference, rather than an embarrassing pimple of dissent, was evidence of a smoldering disaffection within.
The KMT can outwardly deny the bad news, but it had better take it seriously.
Since becoming KMT chairwoman, Cheng has demonstrated lapses of political judgement. Her first major political engagement was a ceremony at Machangding Memorial Park (馬場町紀念公園) in which Wu Shi (吳石), executed in 1950 after being convicted as a CCP spy during the White Terror era, was buried.
Cheng said that she was there to honor those killed during the White Terror era, not to commemorate a CCP spy whose espionage had led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Nationalist Army troops in the Chinese Civil War. Still, the optics of her attendance were disastrous, and were questioned from within her own party and from without.
The DPP also managed to exploit Cheng’s “I will make all Taiwanese proud to be Chinese” statement, with swing voters starting to question whether Cheng’s position represented cultural identification or political capitulation. The DPP framed her assertion as “the KMT expects Taiwanese to concede that they are Chinese, and this is the only way to evade war and to not provoke the CCP into attacking.”
Cheng has said that she intends to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing early this year. The KMT and CCP have denied reports that Beijing has laid down three conditions for the meeting to happen: that she block the government’s military budget, remove obstacles to Chinese investment in Taiwan and do away with any legislation detrimental to unification.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) spokesman Chen Binhua (陳斌華) on Dec. 10 last year denounced the reports as fabrications by the DPP to tarnish the KMT and CCP’s efforts to promote cross-strait dialogue.
That the KMT under Cheng’s leadership has been doing exactly these three things would make some voters doubt those denials and suspect that “the KMT doth protest too much, methinks.”
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