The gamble of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) turned out wrong on Saturday. There, the first elections were held since Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, made a controversial visit to Taiwan in early August. After that visit, tensions between China, Taiwan and the US rose sharply.
Tsai then tried to make the Chinese threat to the island’s security and sovereignty the main issue in Saturday’s local elections. That failed: her DPP achieved a disappointing result. Tsai then resigned as party leader, but will remain as president until the presidential elections in 2024. She will no longer be a candidate that year: she will have served the maximum period of two terms.
“It’s not that the DPP has never failed before,” she said after the election. “We have no time for regrets. We have fallen, but we will rise again.”
The Kuomintang (KMT), the main opposition party, won 13 of the 21 seats for new mayors and district magistrates, including that of the mayor of the capital Taipei. The KMT also won convincingly in the 2018 elections, but Tsai then managed to win a resounding national victory in the 2020 presidential election. At a national level, the theme of the Chinese threat plays a prominent role.
Local themes more important
Saturday’s results mainly show that local elections in Taiwan are still mainly that: elections that revolve around local themes such as tackling corona, crime and air pollution. The approach to corona has been especially critical since Taiwan had to deal with a new wave of infections this year. But the newly elected administrators have no say in Taiwan’s national policies, and the people are well aware of that.
The DPP’s failure to convince voters that the threat from China is the most acute issue indicates that many people see it as an artificially introduced theme into the election that distracts from the real problems at the local level and from the potential failure of the DPP on those issues.
The DPP mayor of Taiwan’s capital Taipei only managed it once. When he noticed that it had little response, he turned back to local politics. That could not prevent him from being defeated by KMT candidate Chiang Wan-an, who is the great-grandson of Taiwan’s first president Chiang Kai-shek.
Traditionally, the KMT has always been in favor of reunification with the mainland, albeit not under communist rule. Partly because there are fewer and fewer people in Taiwan who still strive for this, the party no longer profiles itself on this point. The KMT does think that the DPP is taking a too confrontational course with respect to Beijing. China, for its part, sees the KMT as a party to talk to, unlike the DPP’s “separatists”.
‘Peace in the region’
KMT party chairman Eric Chu said after the election: “We will insist on defending the Republic of China [de officiële landsnaam van Taiwan, red.], and on protecting democracy,” to indicate that he will not side with China. “We will also work hard to keep peace in the region,” he added.
The proposal to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 was rejected on Saturday. That rejection is important for 2024: many young people are more anti-Chinese than their parents, and China therefore had great difficulty with the idea that they would be allowed to vote in the next elections.
All in all, the result is a reassurance for Beijing: the DPP has not been able to profit electorally from the fear of China this time. The Bureau of Taiwanese Affairs said the results show that the majority of Taiwanese public opinion is for peace, stability and a “good life”, that Beijing will continue to work with the people of Taiwan and will continue to oppose independence for Taiwan and foreign interference.