By Tzou Jiing-wen 鄒景雯
The best thing about being a citizen of a democratic country is that you can regularly use your vote to elect new national leaders and ruling parties, and thereby influence the direction that government policy will take. This is a privilege that cannot be enjoyed by the citizens of “eunuch countries” whose democracy has been emasculated. Politicians and political groups in democracies must keep their fingers on the pulse of public opinion and demonstrate their ability to lead. This is how they can be authorized by the majority of voters to assume the duties of public office. Consequently, elections are the best showcase for observing politicians and parties as they try to make the best possible impression.
In normal democratic countries, the main parties, be they left or right wing, seek to ensure their permanence by responding to young people’s needs and doing all they can to propose political standpoints that tally with the standpoint of these younger generations.
The 2020 US presidential election was hotly contested between the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, and the Democratic candidate, US President Joe Biden, who are both grandfathers. Biden, who succeeded in preventing Trump from getting re-elected, won a slim majority of young people’s votes — 55 percent, according to polls.
In the next US presidential election, scheduled for November next year, the two parties will once again battle for the support of young people.
Strangely, with a little over a month to go before Taiwan’s presidential and legislative elections, one of the contending parties seems to have completely abandoned the idea of winning young people’s votes, and this is as true of its choice of vice-presidential candidate as it is of its main campaign themes.
The party’s main purpose and rationale for these choices is to “win back its support base.” Unlike the other two contending parties, this party keeps giving voters the impression that its typical supporters are over 65 years old with a Mainlander background and a “greater China” ideology.
The voice of such people is so loud that it has forced a shift in the image of its presidential candidate, New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), and even induced him to depart from the centrist path that he has stuck to for many years and embark on a clear course of political and economic dependence on China. It is an unusual and surprising turn for Hou.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) leaders might not agree with this phenomenon of the party going back to its origins. They might think that it is a question of numbers. For example, the party’s choice of vice-presidential candidate, Broadcasting Corp of China (BCC) chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), who has one foot in politics and the other in the media, says that the KMT can win the election as long as the Hou-Jaw ticket can beat Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) down below 18 percent in the opinion polls. This is Jaw’s formula for victory.
The unspoken part of the KMT’s calculations is that it can turn things around if it can win back the more than 5.5 million votes that its previous presidential candidate, Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), garnered in 2020.
These wishful calculations do not take into account the problem that the KMT and the TPP are by no means alike. After all, the “white” TPP is not a member of the “pan-blue” camp like the People First Party.
They also do not take into account the problem that, even in an aging society with a falling birthrate, it is doubtful whether anyone can win an election by solely relying on the votes of the elderly. Instead, this strategy has started the engine that will propel the KMT toward being a “sunset party,” and, as everyone knows, once a car starts rolling down a slope, it will keep rolling faster and faster.
Whether this old folk’s party will be labeled as “red,” in the sense of pro-China or pro-communist, is really a secondary issue. The main issue is, if government authorities always start out only from the vested interests of the senior generation when forming their social policies, how can they avoid sidelining the future prospects of the next stage of the nation’s development?
Up to now, the KMT has said nothing about taking a more balanced approach. On the contrary, it keeps coming up with new nonsensical talking points, and therein lies the key problem.
As things stand, the KMT is in government in 15 of Taiwan’s administrative regions, in most cases calling all the shots because it controls both the local government and the council. The upcoming elections next month are not just for the president and vice president, but also for the 113 seats of the Legislative Yuan.
This begs the question of how much of the nation’s political territory should be placed in the hands of an old folk’s party and how we can prevent Taiwan from following this aging party into the sunset.
On Aug. 1, 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) made a speech at a ceremony marking the 90th anniversary of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, in which he bluntly stated that the “KMT reactionaries” of decades ago had “betrayed the revolution and betrayed the people.” What could be more ironic? Can the members of today’s KMT get their act together and make up for the failings of their forebears?
Tzou Jiing-wen is editor-in-chief of the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper).
Translated by Julian Clegg
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