The failure of the recall votes against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators on Saturday showed that broad, one-size-fits-all, anti-China messaging is losing traction with voters, academics said yesterday, calling for a more nuanced approach to defending Taiwan’s democracy.
Twenty-four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers and suspended Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) were targeted in recall elections, and they all survived. A second wave of seven recall votes, along with a referendum on restarting a nuclear power plant, is set for Aug. 23.
The clean sweep by KMT lawmakers was a stinging blow to President William Lai (賴清德) and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), who had hoped to gain control of the Legislative Yuan by ousting some of the opposition legislators.
Photo: Screen grab from the group’s Facebook page
At a forum held to review the recall vote results, Tunghai University politics professor Albert Chiu (邱師儀) said the recall became a contest between livelihood issues and anti-China messaging, and voters chose the former.
“Young people cared more about issues such as low income, high housing prices or conscription reform,” he said.
Regarding external relations, Chiu said the failure of the recall votes indicated that most Taiwanese have begun to consider that the DPP’s anti-China route might cause war, especially as US President Donald Trump has not been friendly in his remarks about Taiwan since he returned to office in January.
Chiu cautioned against framing all KMT lawmakers as pro-China, saying that that approach risked alienating moderate and younger voters who did not experience past KMT authoritarianism or cross-Taiwan Strait hostility firsthand.
“Anti-Communist China narratives need to be more targeted and patient,” he said.
The failed recall did not represent a public shift toward China, but rather a rejection of oversimplified political rhetoric, Chiu said, adding that he felt it was a good time for the president to adopt a softer tone and pursue cross-party dialogue.
Prospect Foundation president Lai I-chung (賴怡忠) said that the results should not be interpreted as pro-China sentiment.
Comparing the vote shares of lawmakers last year, and the rates of pro and anti-recall votes on Saturday showed that the KMT’s mobilization capacity reached 95 percent, while the DPP only had 85 percent, he added.
The KMT considered the recall votes as a war of annihilation of the party, while the DPP was passively driven in strength and motivation, he said.
Pro-recall campaign spokesman Chen Hsiao-wei (陳曉煒) said the recall votes have made Taiwanese democracy more mature, and that it had given incompetent lawmakers a chance to reflect on themselves.
Many lawmakers up for recall bids held sessions of political briefing to the public to gain support ahead of the votes, which were what pro-recall campaigns wanted lawmakers to do — to communicate with the people and perform their duty, he said.
Separately, Foreign Policy Research Institute Asia Program non-resident fellow Joshua Freedman in a report said that the recall results were likely to further harden the KMT’s opposition to DPP governance.
He warned that if leaders become consumed by partisan infighting, they would “struggle to mount an effective strategy for dealing with pressure from Beijing, and they will not be able to navigate increasingly fraught relations with Washington.”
In an interview with Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun, Japanese academic and National Tsing Hua University chair professor Yoshiyuki Ogasawara said that he feared that Chinese Communist Party infiltration in Taiwan could escalate.
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