Sun, May 03, 2026 page8

• Taiwan leans on diplomatic plan B

  • By Romain Blachier
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  The cancelation this week of President William Lai’s (賴清德) state visit to Eswatini, after the Seychelles, Madagascar and Mauritius revoked overflight permits under Chinese pressure, is one more measure of Taiwan’s shrinking executive diplomatic space. Another channel that deserves attention keeps growing while the first contracts.

  For several years now, Taipei has been one of Europe’s busiest legislative destinations. Where presidents and foreign ministers cannot land, parliamentarians do — and they do it in rising numbers.

  The Italian parliament opened the year with its largest bipartisan delegation to Taiwan to date: six Italian deputies and one senator, drawn from six different parties. In June last year, French deputy Marie-Noelle Battistel made her fourth visit to Taiwan — her first as president of the France-Taiwan Parliamentary Friendship Group at the Assemblee nationale.

  In the French Senate, the Senat-Taiwan Exchange and Study Group — the largest Asia-facing friendship caucus in Paris, with 61 senators enrolled — is presided over by Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne.

  Lemoyne, a former French minister and secretary of state under President Emmanuel Macron from 2017 to 2022, in charge successively of tourism, French citizens abroad and foreign trade, returned to parliament as senator in 2023. He could not have led a delegation of this kind to Taipei while in government; his return to parliament reopened the door.

  The pattern runs well beyond Paris and Rome. A 10-member European Parliament delegation led by German member Michael Gahler, a long-standing Taiwan advocate who presides over the parliament’s Taiwan Friendship Group, met with President Lai in Taipei in January this year.

  Prague’s cross-party Czech Republic-Taiwan Parliamentary Platform, chaired by Czech deputy Marek Benda, had been received at the presidential office in November last year.

  In February this year, a composite delegation of eight parliamentarians from seven countries — Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Poland, Sweden and Ukraine — spent six days in Taiwan, a travelling cross-border caucus that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

  The Formosa Club, a network of European legislators working on Taiwan, held this year’s annual conference in Taipei with 45 members of the European Parliament and legislators from 18 national parliaments in attendance. The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) now counts close to 300 parliamentarians across 43 legislatures. In November last year, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) addressed that alliance at a summit in Brussels — a city no sitting Taiwanese president can realistically visit.

  Commentators sometimes describe this contrast as a paradox. It is not. It is the shape of a working system. Taiwan’s international relations now run on two parallel tracks. The executive track — state-to-state, treaty-based — is almost completely closed. The parliamentary track — cross-party, institutional — is wide open, and growing. The two tracks do different jobs.

  What do these delegations actually deliver? More than sceptics might assume.

  The European Parliament’s resolutions on Taiwan — against Chinese coercive measures (including its 2022 resolution supporting Lithuania after Beijing’s trade pressure), on semiconductor supply chain resilience, on Chinese grey-zone operations around the strait — were drafted by members who had themselves visited Taipei, consulted the Legislative Yuan and come home with a working file.

  Parliamentary pressure helped shape the European Commission’s economic security package and its explicit attention to Taiwan in the semiconductor supply chain debate.

  In member-state parliaments the pattern repeats: The German Bundestag’s 2023 resolution on Taiwan’s international participation, the Italian Senate’s repeated statements on strait stability, and the French Senate’s 2021 cross-party text supporting Taiwan’s membership in international organizations — each traces back to delegations that have visited Taiwan.

  The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China’s (IPAC) coordinated public stand on Chinese electoral interference pushed several European executives into action. These are documented outcomes, not press releases.

  A French senator landing in Taipei does not force Paris to revisit “one China.”

  A Taiwanese legislator addressing a Bundestag hearing does not trigger a diplomatic rupture. The executive in each capital keeps its formal ambiguity; the parliamentary channel carries the substance — resolutions, visa facilitation measures, rapporteur reports that feed procurement and export-control debates, and informal crisis contacts built over repeat visits. This is slow, legible policy work, and Beijing has no easy way to close it.

  There is a real paradox in this architecture. The same legislators who fly so easily to Taipei cannot, as a rule, return once they are promoted. A Taiwan-friendly parliamentarian who becomes a foreign minister, a prime minister or a president stops visiting.

  Tony Abbott traveled to Taipei as a former Australian prime minister, not as a sitting one. The pattern is universal across partners: former heads of government come, sitting ones do not. The “one China” price of admission applies to executives; so far, it does not apply to legislators.

  Battistel has been mayor of a mountain commune in the French Alps since 1998 and has spent over a decade building the France-Taiwan parliamentary relationship across five terms at the Assembly. And yet if she were elected president of the French Republic — a hypothetical, but not an unserious notion in a Republic whose politics long ago stopped being predictable — she would lose the access she has spent years earning.

  The ceremony that crowned her career would close the channel she helped build. The same would apply at Matignon or the Quai d’Orsay.

  Lemoyne’s own path shows the same architecture from the other side: As senator he leads delegations to Taipei; as minister of the French Republic, he could not have done so. That is why the parliamentary channel is best understood as a distinct instrument, not a consolation prize waiting to be upgraded. It works precisely because it runs below the executive level.

  A friendship group does not commit troops. A resolution is not a treaty. IPAC can put public pressure on an executive; it cannot replace one.

  The instrument is at its strongest when Taiwanese diplomacy uses it for what it is — a dense, supple network of institutional allies in Europe — rather than dressing it up as something else.

  Several policy implications emerge.

  First, reverse the flows: Send more Taiwanese legislators to address European committees and brief members of the European Parliament directly, rather than waiting for European colleagues to come to Taipei.

  Second, co-author draft legislation with IPAC members rather than react to European resolutions after they are tabled.

  Third, institutionalize friendships beyond single chairs.

  Battistel would one day leave the Assembly, Lemoyne would one day leave the Senate, and the death of former Assembly group chair Jean-Francois Cesarini in 2020 already showed how much continuity is lost when an individual champion is gone. Standing bilateral legislative committees — with full-time staff, their own budgets and their own institutional memory — are the logical next step.

  The incident of Lai’s canceled visit to Eswatini and the visit of Italian politician Alessandro Cattaneo’s delegation to the Legislative Yuan are not two sides of the same story. They belong to two separate diplomatic instruments. Beijing can influence events at the executive level, whereas visits such as Cattaneo’s are beyond Beijing’s control.

  The question Taipei European parliamentarians should be asking is whether the second instrument can carry more of the weight than the first.

  Romain Blachier is a French energy and geopolitics specialist, France-Formosa Association president and a lecturer on energy markets and Indo-Pacific geopolitics at HEIP, ECAM, Universite Lyon 1, INSEEC and ILERI.
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