On Aug. 10, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) convened their national party congress and celebrated the sixth anniversary of their 2019 launch on founder Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) 60th birthday.
Compared to a year ago, the TPP is in pretty good shape, and current party Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) had some solid accomplishments to celebrate.
August and early September of last year were a disaster for the TPP. The party had to acknowledge serious financial improprieties over campaign finances, eventually leading to Ko taking a leave of absence as party chair to take responsibility.
Photo: Chen Yi-kuan, Taipei Times
Simultaneously, the investigation into various alleged corruption charges in multiple cases blew wide open, with TPP offices and Ko’s home being searched. Ko was arrested and held incommunicado starting in early September last year.
In Formosa polling, positive impressions of the TPP plunged from the low-to-mid-thirties previously to only 21.9 percent in late August last year. The party was in disarray, facing an uncertain future.
Although still lower, those positive numbers have since stabilized in the mid-to-upper twenties.
Even better for the TPP, Huang announced that over the past year, party membership increased by just over 10,000, reaching over 32,500. With annual membership fees of NT$500, or NT$10,000 for a lifetime membership, this suggests annual revenues of well over ten million, which, alongside election subsidies, means the party is likely financially stable and growing at an impressive pace.
Under Huang’s leadership, the TPP has stabilized and remains a viable political force, though still much smaller than the two main parties. Even better for the party, they are not a splinter party of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and — as Ko liked to put it — has different DNA.
Previous third parties eventually dissolved or were reabsorbed into the KMT. Though it is still possible they could be absorbed into the KMT, this would be a harder task than it was with the TPP’s predecessors.
TRULY DIFFERENT?
The previous three columns in this series analyzed the differing approaches of Ko and Huang.
In recent years, Ko aligned closer to the pan-blue camp, but was clear the TPP remained independent and the relationship was transactional. Though highly critical of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), he pragmatically left the door open to cooperation on issues where their interests and values aligned.
Huang’s issues with the DPP appear to run deeper, though I can only speculate as to why.
There is a possibility that they were never as far apart as they appeared, however.
Ko was party chair, and would poke the KMT. After the legislative reform bill passed granting broad investigative powers, the KMT was chomping at the bit to punish the DPP retroactively for what they perceived as corruption in the previous eight years — but Ko shut them down by saying it was “not a priority” for the TPP, and that they would focus on providing oversight going forward.
That was a hard slap to KMT caucus convener Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁).
By contrast, Huang was far more publicly happy to cooperate with the KMT and attack the DPP.
There is a possibility this was a tag team effort. As TPP caucus convener, Huang needed to maintain a cordial working relationship with the KMT, while Ko as party chair held the whip to keep the KMT on their toes.
Following Ko’s arrest, Huang and the TPP accused the DPP of “weaponizing the judiciary” to “eliminate” Ko and the opposition. This absolutist stance ruled out any cooperation with the DPP for the foreseeable future.
Since then, the TPP and KMT have worked closely. Circumstances made that easy as they faced a common enemy.
There are some hints that even if Ko and Huang were not so closely aligned in their thinking previously, they have converged somewhat since.
Ko was let out of jail briefly around the new year, and during that tiny window he resigned as party chair, passing the baton to Huang.
Recently in court, Ko mentioned that if he continued to be jailed, he would be like Nelson Mandela. This is very Huang-era language.
HUANG’S HINTS
The TPP has been closely allied with the KMT on defeating the recalls and winning the nuclear referendum. If the recalls had succeeded, the TPP risked becoming irrelevant, and they wanted to win their jointly backed referendum.
The incentives could be changing ahead of the local elections next year. The TPP needs to be thinking ahead, and there are hints Huang may be moving more towards Ko’s approach.
At the party congress, Huang noted that the TPP caucus left a seat open for Ko during their strategy meetings, saying: “I have always kept it open, not just to remind everyone to uphold the spirit and values that chairman Ko had when he founded the party, but more importantly, because we are all waiting for him to come back.”
It is easy to cynically dismiss these gestures, especially coming from a different political camp, but the sustained thoughtfulness, lack of heavy publicity of it previously and watching Huang speak, this came across as genuine.
Ko repeatedly said that cultivating political talent was the biggest challenge facing the party. Huang led a charge to reject a proposal to scrap one of Ko’s smartest strategic moves, requiring their party list lawmakers to step down after two years to allow the next ones on the list to move up, doubling the opportunities for them to cultivate talent.
In supporting this rule, Huang echoed Ko’s strategy: “Ko Wen-je said that this party started with one person, but it can never end because of one person.”
Interestingly, he also copied Ko’s description of the TPP as a “local, third-party force,” which sets it apart from the KMT, which was founded in China.
Following the party congress, Huang announced he was running for New Taipei mayor, and specified Yilan, Changhua, and Chiayi City as places the TPP may run candidates. He carefully left open the door for “goodwill” negotiations with the KMT, and reiterated his top goal is to take down President William Lai (賴清德).
Notably, despite all the time he spent recently with the KMT leadership, he clearly did not consult them in advance before making his announcement. This caught the KMT off guard, but until their party chair election is finished in October, there is nothing they can do.
If cozying up to the KMT was a strategy to win over their voters, Huang may want to rethink it.
Under Ko’s previous independent-but-allied approach appealing to pan-blue leaning voters and independents fed up with the two main parties, 45.8 percent of self-identified KMT supporters had positive views on the TPP in June of 2023.
Despite working very closely with the KMT caucus last spring, in June of last year it stood at 48.8 percent. After campaigning this year in support of KMT lawmakers to defend them against recall, in June of this year it was 50.8 percent.
If that was their strategy, it gets worse. Of those with positive views, around 90 percent had only “somewhat” positive views. It appears that no matter how close the TPP draws to the KMT, their support among KMT supporters barely budges, and they are showing no sign of switching parties.
Conversely, if the KMT’s strategy of echoing the language of the TPP is an effort to win over TPP voters, it is faring even worse. From June of last year to June this year, self-described TPP supporters’ positive views of the KMT dropped from 53.7 to 39.8 percent.
It is still too early to determine what the TPP’s strategy in the Huang era will be going forward, but these early hints suggest a possible shift to something closer to that of the Ko era.
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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