TAIPEI - Forty-six-year-old Wei Si-you, a
farmer in southern Taiwan's Tainan county, voted
for the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP)
candidate Frank Hsieh in the island's recent
presidential election, even though some of his
friends and neighbors in the traditional DPP
stronghold switched to the opposition Nationalist
Party or Kuomintang (KMT). In future local,
legislative and presidential elections, Wei said
he will continue to vote DPP.
"The KMT
ruled Taiwan with suppression in the past ... I
still remember when we were young, the teachers
would beat us if we accidentally spoke the
Taiwanese dialect in school," said Wei, referring
to one of the KMT's most unpopular policies -
banning the local dialect from being spoken in
schools.
Wei also knows friends and
neighbors whose relatives were
arrested during the period of
"White Terror" in which thousands of people were
killed or arrested for opposing, or being
suspected of opposing, the KMT.
"When
grownups discussed politics back then, they told
us kids 'You have ears, no mouth'. We were so
scared at that time. So many people of my
generation or older have a repulsion against the
KMT," Wei said.
But diehard DPP supporters
like Wei are becoming fewer. Many switched to the
KMT in both the January 12 legislative and March
22 presidential elections. Weeks after losing the
presidential race to its rival, DPP insiders and
analysts said members need to assess how a party,
which embodied the hopes of many people for change
just a few years ago, could have lost so badly.
Perhaps more importantly, they said, the
party needs to figure out where to go from here -
including how to hold on to core voters like Wei
as well as rebuild its platform and appeal to more
people.
"What we need to determine now is
what are the structural factors that contributed
to our failure, what future challenges Taiwan will
face, and within the future challenges, what role
will the DPP play," said Lai I-Chung, deputy
director of the DPP's international affairs
department.
"If we fail to do this, voters
will not believe in our ability to navigate the
future of Taiwan ... It's actually more about the
future, not about the past."
Stagnating
wages, high inflation and the perception that the
DPP and its first president, Chen Shui-bian,
focused too heavily on Taiwan's independence at
the expense of boosting the economy, caused many
voters to vote against the DPP in the two recent
major elections. Voters also believed that by
failing to build closer economic ties with rival
China, the DPP administration hurt the island's
competitiveness and cost it jobs,
In
addition to losing the presidency, the DPP, which
previously faced only a small majority from the
KMT and its allied parties in the Legislative
Yuan, now has less than one-fourth of the total
seats in the legislature, with the KMT controlling
nearly three-fourths of the seats. This means the
KMT can pass laws and amend the constitution
without any DPP support. Also, DPP members hold
only seven of the 25 county magistrate and city
mayoral seats in Taiwan.
"They're not
going to have much influence ... The party would
have to go back to ground zero. They're going to
have to start almost from scratch," said Shane
Lee, a politics and law professor at the Institute
of Taiwan Studies at Chang Jung Christian
University in Tainan.
About the only thing
the DPP can do is to "make noise", Lee said, by
finding fault in the KMT's policies and actions
and trying to influence public opinion that way -
a method that it employed in its early days as an
opposition party.
How things got this bad
is a question many DPP members are asking lately.
Coming to terms with the answers, however, won't
be easy for a party which rose from humble
beginnings - it was founded in 1986 by family
members and defense lawyers of political prisoners
during the KMT's authoritarian rule - and quickly
grew from being technically illegal until 1991 to
the ruling party in 2000, ending more than half a
century of KMT rule.
"There are many
reasons for the party's failures, but to me the
biggest reasons are lack of internal coherence and
failure to deliver on policy promises," Lai said.
Supporters, including those who remember
and appreciate the DPP's heyday of fighting for
democracy and social welfare, became disillusioned
after they re-elected Chen for a second term as
president in 2004 and did not see results from his
administration, or the DPP, on promises to take
back illegally obtained KMT party assets, root out
corruption and streamline the government.
Corruption involving DPP party officials,
especially alleged embezzlement and insider
trading by Chen's family, turned off many
supporters. The DPP argues that corruption during
KMT rule was much worse, but the people expected
better, Lai and others said.
Supporters
also lost interest in one of the party's main
causes - promoting Taiwan's independence from
China, which still claims the island as part of
its territory. People preferred the party focus
instead on issues that had a direct impact on
their lives - especially creating jobs and
boosting incomes.
Young voters in
particular increasingly supported the rival KMT,
seeing it as the party of the future and hope,
much like the way they saw the DPP back in 2000
when Chen was elected as Taiwan's first non-KMT
president.
Also, structural problems which
allowed Chen to exercise too much power, without
the party being able to influence much of his
decision making, was another problem, said a
senior DPP official who requested anonymity.
"The party could not control policy. That
was the problem we were facing. When the president
is so powerful, the party could not pressure him,"
said the official.
"There was no built-in
mechanism to reflect complaints from the
grassroots level. The only way to communicate with
the president was through the party's central
standing committee meetings every Wednesday and
only 10 to 15 people can speak at those meetings.
Even I can't speak," the official said.
As
a result, the party which claimed to be the bridge
between its supporters and the legislative and
executive branches, could not do its job, he said.
Lack of unity - especially personality
differences between Hsieh and Chen - also spelled
Hsieh's defeat, others said.
"Not everyone
in the party contributed money and effort to
Hsieh's campaign, unlike the presidential campaign
in 2004, which was an all-out effort. This is part
of the reason why Hsieh lost by more than 2
million votes," said Hsu Yung-ming, a political
science professor and expert on the DPP in Soochow
University in Taipei.
Hsieh also refused
the Executive Yuan's resources, wanting to
distance himself from the unpopular Chen, Hsu
said.
"Chen felt the legislative and
presidential races were linked, but Hsieh
disagreed. Hsieh didn't help legislators during
the legislative race so few helped him in the
presidential election," Hsu said.
The
short-lived premierships during Chen's eight years
as president also had something to do with
discontinuity of DPP policies, experts said,
noting that most of the DPP's achievements,
including major infrastructure construction, were
accomplished under former premier Yu Shyi-kun from
2002 to 2005, the "golden age of the DPP". Three
other premiers served under Chen after that.
"President Chen likes to play checks and
balances of possible successors to him; he wanted
none of them to be too strong to threaten his
position," said the anonymous DPP official.
In meetings at the party's headquarters in
past weeks, there has been a lot of finger
pointing as well as factional fighting as
different key players vie for the party
chairmanship, insiders said. Hsieh is stepping
down as party chairman in May.
"Right now,
all the discussion about the party's structure is
about political fighting, not the real issues,"
said the DPP official.
Lee believes the
DPP needs to return to its roots and ideals. "I
think they have to go back to when they were the
opposition. They have to be very clean and they
have to live up to their words. And they have to
find good talent instead of using favoritism,"
said Lee.
The party could do well by also
de-emphasizing frequent rehashing of the KMT's
ghosts, such as the "White Terror" period, as the
public seems increasingly eager to move on, but
that doesn't mean the DPP should not champion
human rights issues, Lee said.
"There are
still a lot of people in the lower echelons who
need to be taken care of - the poor, the
disadvantaged. This is the core of their support
base. In the past eight years, they've somehow
forgotten their base," said Lee. "They haven't
done much for these people. They were busy with
their own personal issues."
There have
been media reports that a younger generation of
DPP members including rising star Luo Wen-jia, a
former DPP legislator, will be promoted to higher
positions, including party chairman, but some
officials believe that will not necessarily fix
internal problems, one of the biggest of which is
losing touch with the voters.
"We have to
find out what the fundamental issues are and serve
the people," Lai said.
How the party fares
in the next four years under the KMT presidency of
popular president-elect Ma Ying-jeou will depend
also on whether Ma succeeds in carrying out his
campaign pledges of stimulating economic growth
through closer business ties with China. If Ma
succeeds, voters will have more confidence in the
KMT and could reward Ma with another four years in
office, which will further sideline the DPP. "The
DPP's biggest hope is the KMT doesn't do well,"
Hsu said bluntly.
Meanwhile, voters like
Wei continue to put their faith in the DPP.
The party was able to go from a
pro-environmentalist and pro-democracy platform in
its early days and had helped to push for direct
elections of the president and legislature by
Taiwan's electorate, before shifting focus towards
promoting Taiwanese independence in the 1990s. It
can adapt itself again, Wei and others believe.
Despite the landslide victory by Ma, about
41% of the voters voted for Hsieh - not a small
percentage.
"The DPP is good. After the
DPP came into power, there was more social welfare
for the people," said Wei, citing as one example
Chen's policy of giving elderly people who are not
rich a monthly stipend as well as the DPP
administration's overseeing the completion of
several major infrastructure projects, including
the "snow tunnel" and high-speed rail link.
Wei blamed the party's defeats on bad
timing: "The price of everything was rising, while
incomes didn't."
One of the biggest
accomplishments of the DPP and Chen, in Wei's
opinion, is helping Taiwanese people feel proud of
their heritage, including encouraging them to not
only speak but study the local Taiwanese dialect
and other local languages and dialects.
"Now my kids only speak Mandarin in class.
All the other times, they speak the Taiwanese
dialect Taiyu. The teachers don't care," said Wei.
"The schools even teach Taiyu, including how every
phrase has a story behind it. Even I couldn't
teach my kids that. This is very good."
Cindy Sui is a
freelance journalist based in Taipei.
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