Taiwan: Political Predicament for the KMT, Dilemma for the DPP
Best friends
Ma’s legacy may not be as bad as it looks
With the first-ever meeting in Singapore on Nov. 7 between the leaders of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China now a month old, the dust has settled enough to seek to assess its impact.
The popular result was depressingly predictable for the flailing Kuomintang, the current ruling party. Recent polls show that 52.7 percent of Taiwanese voters regarded the meeting as an infamous performance by their soon-to-be former president, Ma Ying-jeou and an attempt to manipulate the electorate. More overwhelmingly, roughly 80 percent regarded the meeting between Ma and Chinese President Xi Jinping as in no way a benefit for Taiwan.
However, the meeting doesn’t mean unalloyed success for the opposition Democratic Progressive Party and its presidential candidate, Tsai Ing-wen and her running mate, Chen Chien-jen, in general elections scheduled for January. Ma’s legacy may not be as tainted as it looks despite his current disapproval rating of 70 percent. The DPP will need to be very careful in the latter half of this decade. Should the party gain all but certain victory in 2016, it will still have to move forward in the light of the very possibly superficial, but nonetheless historic Ma-Xi meeting.
Spy vs. Spy
The breaking news of the exchange of imprisoned Taiwanese spies Chu Kung-hsun and Hsu Chang-kuo earlier this week for China’s Li Zhihao makes this all the more difficult for the DPP to stay loyal to its base of status quo-now, independence-later supporters without going down in history as spoiling diplomatic breakthroughs with the mainland.
As news reports this week made it clear that the spy handover was in fact negotiated before the Ma-Xi meeting, it seems more obvious that it was part of a political strategy to not necessarily help reverse the KMT’s chances of winning this election, but to rather place the DPP in a difficult situation in the early days of its control of the island.
In turn, this may cause Taiwanese textbooks to treat Ma more kindly in the years to come. For this reason, it is all the more understandable why the DPP supporters are more incensed, which again makes it dangerous for them to once again go down the slippery slope to losing credibility.
Over the past several months, in large part because of the continuing missteps of the ruling Kuomintang and Ma, the DPP – a political organization that seemed doomed after its president, Chen Shui-bian, was imprisoned in 2008 for several counts of corruption – appears certain to win the next election, expected in January. The currently ruling Kuomintang is so badly handicapped that it was forced to scrap its abrasive presidential candidate, Hung Hsiu-chu, and replace her with Eric Chu, a lackluster party wheelhorse, as candidate.
