What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)?
With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity.
Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
After eight years as an independent Taipei mayor and then as 2024 presidential candidate at the head of the TPP, Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) differed from the two big parties in several key aspects, though he shifted from being closer to the pan-green camp, railing against the Ma government, to railing against the Tsai administration and drawing close to the pan-blues. Ko, like Huang today, are contrarians driven by opposing those in power, not ideologues, much as Huang especially would like to claim otherwise.
Candidates and political parties need to define themselves by both what they are for, and what they are against — though the balance varies according to circumstance. They mix policy and ideological conflicts to clearly distinguish themselves from their opponents, and then add generous dollops of mudslinging and paint their opponents as totally unacceptable to any rational thinking human being.
To make the case that they are better than the alternative, they also have to provide a vision of a future based on their leadership — or at least plans that they think voters will respond to. All three presidential candidates in the last election toured the country making the case for their policy platforms, why their vision was the way forward and that they uniquely could be entrusted with the power to deliver.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Ma and Tsai won the presidency by articulating public discontent with the incumbent ruling parties and providing a vision forward that was compelling to voters. In the US, Joe Biden won on disenchantment with Donald Trump and a vision voters bought into; then, four years later, Trump successfully flipped that script on Biden and the Democrats.
Transformative politicians inspire hope that their futures will more closely resemble the aspirations, goals and ideals of their voters, while painting their opponents as useless or worse.
HUANG’S RISING STAR
Though he was openly closer to the pan-blue camp during the election, Ko and the TPP were successful in differentiating themselves enough to draw a respectable 28 percent vote for Ko as president and won enough legislative seats to hold the balance of power between the two bigger parties. For a fledgling five-year-old party, this was a decent showing.
Following Ko’s detention on various corruption charges at the end of August last year, throughout the autumn Huang’s star rose in the party. He led a scorched-earth campaign of fierce opposition to the DPP and refusal to compromise with them in the legislature, fueled with accusations against the DPP of “dictatorship” and a campaign of “eliminating the opposition” by “weaponizing the judiciary” in incarcerating Ko.
Following his election as party chairman in January, Huang has doubled down on this strategy. There is no middle ground in his politics, it is an all-or-nothing war of the heroic TPP and their KMT allies battling for the good of the people against the evil dictator Lai and his autocratic regime.
Huang spoke about what the TPP was for, but only in vague platitudes and only in contrast to his depictions of the DPP. They are for democracy, human rights, judicial fairness and grandma’s ractopamine-free beef noodle soup recipe — the things he claimed the DPP was bent on destroying.
What Huang left out was what specific policies and plans the TPP was for. When pressed, he would support what is effectively the KMT party line: all in for nuclear power, slashing the government budget, expanding the power of the legislature, defending the death penalty and so forth. His specific policy recommendations have been narrow and subsets of other issues, such as allowing filming of trials so the public could witness the Ko trial.
It is not as if the TPP has no policies, plans or achievements. Their legislators have been working hard on various issues.
Some of their bills have received backing by the KMT, or modified elements of KMT legislation. This has made it hard to differentiate TPP goals and accomplishments from the KMT’s, especially as the TPP mostly backs KMT-led efforts rather than the other way around.
In spite of accomplishments by the TPP, Huang makes little effort to highlight them. He is focused on tearing down the DPP, not building up the TPP. This is unlike Ko, who understood that allying with the KMT could be beneficial, but that the TPP needed to retain some independence and separate identity.
Until April, this single-minded focus on attacking the DPP did differentiate them from the KMT. Though some in the KMT used similar language, they had a broader range of topics.
Then KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) pivoted by not only stealing the TPP playbook, but going further by unapologetically comparing Lai to Hitler, and the DPP to Nazis and “green commies.”
That has left very little defining the TPP as anything other than a pan-blue subsidiary of the KMT.
THE WRECK OF THE HUANG BLITZGERALD
Ko was acutely aware of the precedents of the People’s First Party (PFP) and New Party (NP). Both rose to prominence but eventually absorbed into the KMT. Ko spoke about this, and even when working with the KMT, openly retained some distrust and ensured that on some issues his party took different stances.
Ko had executive experience running Taipei without a party backing him. By necessity, he had to work with other parties to get anything passed, which requires compromise.
Huang’s only government experience is as a lawmaker. Many lawmakers take their legislative duties seriously, but they are also trained to grandstand, hold up banners and at times throw punches.
Huang rose to prominence in civil society circles, and his no-compromise approach is good for organizing and inspiring in that context.
After co-founding the New Power Party (NPP) and eventually leading the party, that approach alienated many, causing considerable damage. The party was centered around strong-willed individuals with strong opinions, which appeared to irritate Huang when they disagreed with his own. He eventually left to join the TPP
Huang’s self-image appears centered around himself standing on stage with his fist in the air, battling injustice. He is a perpetual outrage machine.
Listening to others and building consensus is not in his background, nor apparently in his character. This brittle arrangement will be tested come election time.
If anyone in the TPP is advising him to restore a unique TPP identity for the longer-term good of the party, he has so far ignored them.
In theory, he could be playing a longer-term strategic game by first defining the DPP as the enemy to build up a battle lust. Then relying on the fact that mostly TPP members — unlike the PFP and NP — are not refugees from the KMT to launch a new vision unencumbered by the baggage of the two main parties, as Ko tried to do.
So far there is no evidence of this.
It is easy to imagine a final image of the ship of the TPP sinking, full guns blazing at the DPP. Huang’s fist raised in defiance being the last thing we see as it descends below the waves of political relevancy.
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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