Elections in Taiwan: Political surgery

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

THIS year is unlikely to be remembered fondly by Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou. He entered it with opinion polls at record lows. Spring saw students occupying the legislature for more than three weeks in protest against his efforts to forge closer ties with China; thousands took to the streets to back them. Local elections on November 29th are likely to compound his misery. Voters will choose more than 11,100 mayors, town chiefs and councillors. Prospects for Mr Ma’s party, the Kuomintang (KMT), look grim.

With presidential elections due in January 2016, the polls will be closely watched. A bad showing for the KMT would be a good presidential omen for the island’s main opposition group, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which lost the presidency to Mr Ma six years ago. By then Mr Ma will have served two terms in office, so he will be constitutionally obliged to step down.

The contest for the post of mayor in the capital, Taipei, will be especially important. The city has remained a stronghold of the KMT ever since the party was forced to flee to the island from the mainland in 1949 at the end of the Chinese civil war. The DPP has won in the city only a single time: 20 years ago, when the KMT vote was split by a spin-off party. Now Ko Wen-je (pictured), an eminent surgeon who is without political experience and is running as an independent, is polling higher than Sean Lien, a scion of one of the KMT’s richest political families.

The KMT chose Mr Lien as its candidate through a ballot of its members in the capital. But many Taiwanese see him as a privileged princeling. His father, Lien Chan, is a former vice-president who has helped forge closer ties between the KMT and China. The younger Mr Lien decided to enter politics after a lone gunman shot him at an election rally in 2010. Before that he worked in business, including in investment banking—experience, he says, that will help him manage Taipei’s economy. But many of Taipei’s young people, who were out on the streets in strength during the “sunflower movement” in and around the legislature in spring, resent the business elite. Mr Ko, who is often affectionately called “Ko P” (short for professor), appeals to those Taiwanese who are fed up with bickering between the two main parties. Being a doctor (he is chairman of the traumatology department at National Taiwan University Hospital), not a politician, appears to have helped him.

The DPP decided not to field a candidate in Taipei after the party’s polls showed that Mr Ko was more popular within the DPP than any candidate it could field itself. Mr Ko appeals not only to middle-of-the-road voters, but also to some in the DPP who want formal independence for the island. Mr Ko has given support in the past to the DPP but has tried to avoid the question of independence during his campaign.

The ruling party is also lagging behind in the contest for mayor in the central city of Taichung, which it has held since 2001. In addition, it could lose an important mayoralty in Keelung, a northern port, because of a split within its camp there: a candidate ditched by the KMT is running as an independent. Meanwhile DPP candidates in the south, where the opposition is at its strongest, still enjoy comfortable support.

Being local elections, this month’s votes are more about housing and city infrastructure than relations with China. But they still hold implications for cross-strait relations. Although the DPP is more accommodating towards China than it was before Mr Ma took office, if it gains a boost, China will look askance at it.

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