Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s incumbent President, governed with two parliaments in which her party had a comfortable majority (62 of 114 seats from 2016 to 2020 and 61 of 114 seats from 2020 to 2024). Vice President Lai Ching-te who is going to succeed her as President in May, will probably have to settle for 51 or 52 of 113 seats.
Where’s my new office?
That may look like bad news, but if you presume that the results express a collective intention, it is this: the voters prefer Lai over Hou Yu-ih (KMT) and Ko Wen-je (TPP), but they don’t trust him as much as they trusted Tsai Ing-wen.
With good reason. While Tsai wasn’t a great speaker, she weighed her words carefully, she was always well-prepared for whatever questions she would be asked, and she never acted as if there was only one political party in Taiwan (her governing DPP). In fact, she claimed much of the Taiwanese heritage that the KMT considered their property, most notably the memory of Chiang Ching-kuo – terrible KMT dictator, but also a facilitator of democratic change. From the beginning, and in fact even four years before she actually won the presidency, she made it clear that she stood on the constitutional foundation of the Republic of China (RoC).
That looked easy, but it wasn’t. Before Tsai took office, there were fears that she would be at odds with her party, where a lot of people want the Republic to wear a more Taiwanese, and a less Chinese hat. In fact, many DPP menbers would like to burn the Chinese hat and never wear it again. But Tsai kept these desires under a lid.
Not that China would have reciprocated for that. But China is nothing to wait for anyway. What mattered is that Tsai achieved the same status with the U.S., Taiwan’s main ally, as her KMT predecessor Ma Ying-jeou (“We are no troublemakers”), and then improved Taiwan’s status further, by giving the island a strong international profile and by focusing on economic and social issues at home otherwise.
Lai may find it harder to convince his fellow partisans – and himself – that this is the right course to steer. And he may also have his blunders, although not nearly as badly as you’d have to expect them from Ko Wen-je, who came in third in today’s presidential elections.
But what happened to Lai on December 30th, as explained here by “Frozen Garlic”, wouldn’t have happened to Tsai Ing-wen.
Lai won’t have to overcome a monolithic block of opposition, when seeking compromises with the legislative yuan, i. e. parliament. But he will have to make a case for many of his projects, and he will have to convince not so like-minded politicians that his goals are worth their support.
It seems to me that today’s election day is a pretty good day for Taiwan – though not exactly as good as the two times when Tsai won the presidential elections, in January 2016, and in January 2020. Lai was a successful prime minister and Vice President of Taiwan, but it is hard to imagine the successes in modernizing the country’s economy and in making it a sought-after partner for the international community without Tsai Ing-wen’s leadership. The good news is that the DPP remains a party with great talents: Lai himself, former health minister Chen Shih-chung (if you remember how well Taiwan did during the Covid-19 pandemic), or Audrey Tang, for example.
The President, not the Legislative Yuan, will have the final say in forming a government or cabinet. If Lai Ching-te makes good choices and wins support within the DPP and beyond, he might well earn the DPP a fourth consecutive presidential term, in 2028.
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