With the overwhelming passage of constitutional amendments yesterday, hope has been rekindled that a new constitution will come into being in 2006, analysts said.
"The passage of the constitutional amendments paves the way to the new constitution that is set to be born in 2006, as President Chen has promised to his supporters," Chin Heng-wei (
Chin said that Chen chose to made his constitutional reform proposal at his inauguration speech on May 20, to replace his campaign promise to rewrite the constitution. That led many to doubt the possibility of reform, since the regulations for passing constitutional amendments were quite strict.
But yesterday's result proved that as long as the two major political parties -- the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) -- are willing to cooperate towards the same goal, it is difficult for small parties to stop them, Chin said.
"This is quite important to President Chen," Chin said. "It makes people believe Chen's words that a new constitution will be born in 2006."
The most important constitutional amendments that were passed yesterday -- the halving of the number of legislative seats and the implementation of a single-member district, two-vote electoral system -- were unexpected, because of past political wrangling, said Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明), assistant researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences at Academia Sinica.
"Whether to pass the constitutional amendments is a game of `chicken' for the political parties," Hsu said. "The party who first shrinks will lose the game."
Fearing the "anti-reform" label, the two small parties -- the People First Party (PFP) and Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) -- supported cutting the number of legislative seats from 225 to 113, even though the very existence of their parties may be jeopardized by the move.
Under public pressure and with the year-end legislative elections looming, the parties had no choice but to support the constitutional amendments -- or risk a fiasco in December, Hsu said.
Hsu said the passage of the amendments marked a decisive structural change in the legislature.
"It shows that society wants to punish the legislators, whose disordered performances have driven the public to the edge of endurance," Hsu said.
Chiang Ming-chin (
"It was a prisoner's dilemma. The pan-blue camp had no alternative but to support the legislature's downsizing ... The KMT might keep its `reformist' image for the time being, but it could still suffer from decreasing political resources," Chiang said.
DPP Secretary-General Chang Chun-hsiung (
"Because of everyone's efforts, we have finally fulfilled the dream of more than two decades," Chang said.
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