On May 2, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫), at a meeting in support of Taipei city councilors at party headquarters, compared President William Lai (賴清德) to Hitler. Chu claimed that unlike any other democracy worldwide in history, no other leader was rooting out opposing parties like Lai and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). That his statements are wildly inaccurate was not the point. It was a rallying cry, not a history lesson.
This was intentional to provoke the international diplomatic community into a response, which was promptly provided. Both the German and Israeli offices issued statements on Facebook rightly decrying this deeply disturbing analogy.
The German response was shared online by the offices of the EU and other European countries. As the German Institute in Taipei put it: “Any attempt to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime or to draw parallels between the atrocities committed in Germany and Europe between 1933 and 1945 and the current political situation in Taiwan is profoundly troubling.”
Photo: Lin Je-yuan, Taipei Times
The office also defended Taiwan’s democracy: “We must state unequivocally: Taiwan today is in no way comparable to the tyranny of National Socialism. The institutions in Taiwan cannot and must not be likened to the instruments of terror employed by the Nazi regime.”
Right on cue, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and pan-green politicians also condemned Chu’s comments.
The press has been describing it as some sort of slip of the tongue or mistake, but there is zero chance that was the case. Chu talked about it at length, describing Hitler and the Nazis eliminating opposition parties one-by-one.
Photo: AFP
On the evening of April 15, pro-KMT recall campaign leader Sung Chien-liang (宋建樑) showed up at the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office where he was due to be questioned on fraud allegations. He arrived wearing a Nazi armband and carrying a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He repeatedly performed Nazi salutes for the press. This was similarly condemned by Germany, Israel, MOFA and opposition parties.
The KMT and Chu’s responses to that incident were not apologies. Chu said the KMT “firmly opposes” fascist, Nazi and communist dictatorships, but then suggested that the DPP wanted to “lock up” opposition party members, leaving the connection between the two implied. He described the recall campaigner’s actions as a way of “satirizing the DPP dictatorship.”
At the time, I wrongly assessed that Chu was trying to thread the needle between defending KMT supporters and distancing the party from a horribly distasteful analogy between Taiwan’s law enforcement and Hitler.
Chu skirted the line during the KMT’s “Oppose Dictatorship” rally on April 26 by saying that Lai was “more fascist than the fascists.”
NO MISTAKE
Local news portrays Chu’s latest comments as a mistake, and Chu structured it to give them that impression. By speaking at an “internal” KMT event, it could be portrayed as “not for public consumption.”
Except that is was for public consumption. It was being recorded and his comments were far too extensive to have been off-the-cuff. This was not just any KMT meeting, he was there to pump up the troops in front of the press.
Not only did he observe the response by the international diplomatic community, MOFA and pan-green politicians in April, he has been around long enough to have observed this pattern repeating over decades.
Chu knew exactly what the response would be and used the international diplomatic community and domestic opposition responses to play to his audience for domestic political gain. He knew the domestic response alone would not get the media coverage he desired, so he dragged in Hitler to ensure bigger coverage.
Chu issued no apologies and dug in by calling for “foreign governments to not meddle in (Taiwan’s) domestic politics.” Hitler is not a domestic political figure. The Germans have every right to comment, as well as the Israelis and the European nations — who bore the brunt of Nazi war and genocide — that chose to honor and respect the German response by sharing their post.
But Chu doesn’t care. For most Taiwanese Hitler and the Nazis are remote and are used as shorthand for “evil dictatorship” without much thought or consideration about the specific implications of their actions and the dark depths that human politics can descend to.
The KMT chairman is using these terms like parents use the boogeyman to scare children.
CHU EMBRACES HITLER REFERENCES
In April, Chu successfully used a protest against prosecutors detaining pro-KMT recall campaigners to appropriate the language and messaging of the base and their partners in the legislature, the Taipei People’s Party (TPP). The campaigners allegedly committed fraud by filling out forms using KMT membership rolls and forging their signatures, including those already dead. He built up enough momentum to hold an “Oppose Dictatorship” rally on April 26 that had a very successful and enthusiastic turnout.
Chu has put himself back at the center of the conversation and mobilized enthusiasm among the base. The question now becomes how to sustain this momentum through to the recall and, later, to September’s KMT party chair election. It is widely assumed he is running for re-election, and that he’ll only drop out if he expects to lose in a landslide.
Chu has positioned himself as a warrior for the pan-blue cause and used his Hitler comments to, as he sees it, courageously take a stand in the face of condemnation. In the past, both he and the party would have been embarrassed by a party supporter using Hitler and the Nazis as props to score political points.
Now, it is the KMT party chairman Eric Chu doing it.
US AGAINST THE WORLD
The TPP and KMT are messaging an existential crisis facing the survival of Taiwan’s democracy against the “more fascist than the fascists” Lai regime out to “annihilate” all political opposition, starting with the detention of the “martyr of democracy,” TPP founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲). To them, only a pan-blue popular uprising will save democracy.
The pan-blue side is leaning in heavily on unproven assertions. They are right that pan-green recall campaigners are using extraordinary and unprecedented tactics to overturn the results of the legislative election last year.
However, the pan-greens have more legitimacy on their side in their claims of defending democracy against KMT efforts to usurp constitutional authority in the legislature, create a crisis in the Constitutional Court and hamstring the government through budget cuts and freezes. Though the mass recalls are not being used as they were intended, voters at the end of the day can choose to support them or reject them.
Blind tribal identity politics have always been a problem in Taiwan, but this base-versus-base war is escalating to levels not seen in decades. Facts mean little in identity politics.
That some diplomatic offices spoke up with the same condemnations of Chu and the KMT as the DPP and the Lai administration further built a sense of “they’re all out to get us” grievance and paranoia. This is potentially a dangerous shift from “us against the Lai regime” mentality to “us against the world” — well, except for China.
There are some tentative indications that their message is making inroads among the broader public and that Chu is in a desperate all-out war to survive regardless of the risks.
Donovan’s Deep Dives is a regular column by Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文) who writes in-depth analysis on everything about Taiwan’s political scene and geopolitics. Donovan is also the central Taiwan correspondent at ICRT FM100 Radio News, co-publisher of Compass Magazine, co-founder Taiwan Report (report.tw) and former chair of the Taichung American Chamber of Commerce. Follow him on X: @donovan_smith.
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