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On January 13th 2024, voters will elect Taiwan’s next president, as well as its legislature. How to deal with China is the central theme of the campaign. Communist China has never ruled the democratic island of 24m people, but still claims it as its territory and refuses to rule out a military attack. Almost every day China sends warplanes into the Taiwan Strait. America is also stepping up military exercises with its allies across the Indo-Pacific. Taiwan’s next president will be at the centre of simmering superpower rivalries.
The Economist is tracking the election. Here you will find the latest polls, short guides to each candidate and an explanation of what Taiwan’s election means for the island and for the world.
Voting intention, %
The candidates
Lai Ching-te
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
Lai Ching-te, also known as William Lai, is a softly spoken former doctor who has held almost every top political post in Taiwan. He was a legislator for over a decade, then a popular mayor of the southern city of Tainan. Mr Lai is most appealing to hardline independence supporters, but in the past he has also been popular with centrist voters. Distrusted by China, he once described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence”. Mr Lai has promised to stick to Ms Tsai’s careful dictum: that because Taiwan is already independent, it needs no further declarations. Still, if he wins, China seems sure to continue to threaten and isolate Taiwan.
Hou Yu-ih
Kuomintang (KMT)
Hou Yu-ih is a burly former policeman who in 2006 headed Taiwan’s National Police Agency. Born to street-market pork dealers in Chiayi, a pro-independence stronghold in the south, he has a “Taiwanese flavour”, in the words of a former DPP legislator. There are hopes in the KMT that he will counter the party’s elite image and appeal to voters outside the party’s traditional base of mainland immigrants and their descendants. Last year Mr Hou easily won re-election as the mayor of New Taipei City (the exurbs surrounding the capital) as a moderate with a reputation for efficiency. He advocates talks with the Communist Party to lower cross-strait tensions.
Ko Wen-je
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP)
Ko Wen-je was a surgeon until he ran for mayor of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, as an independent in 2014. He defeated a KMT politician in a landslide, despite having no prior political experience, and served for two terms until 2022. Four years ago he founded the Taiwan People’s Party. Mr Ko casts himself as a “rational” and “scientific” technocrat, and has focused more on domestic concerns such as energy and housing than relations with China. His TPP is not strong enough to win a legislative majority and his best hope is that it ends up holding the balance of power in parliament. Mr Ko advocates a coalition with the KMT. Mr Ko claims to offer a “third choice” for voters between provoking China and deferring to it. In fact, his China policies are closer to the KMT’s.
What’s at stake?
Voters will decide if they want to continue with the policies of President Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party. She was elected in 2016 and is constitutionally barred from running for a third term. Ms Tsai, a moderate, angered Beijing’s leaders by refusing to openly state that Taiwan is part of China. During her time in office China severed formal communications with Taiwan and stepped up military pressure. Ms Tsai successfully presented the self-governing island to America as a willing partner in its pushback against China. The DPP’s presidential candidate, and the frontrunner, is William Lai Ching-te, her deputy. He says he will continue with her approach.
He is far from certain to win, however. Although almost two-thirds of the island’s people say they identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese, a viewpoint that is exclusive to the DPP among Taiwan’s major parties, most Taiwanese also want a reignited dialogue with the mainland. And the DPP has image problems. The party grew out of opposition to four decades of dictatorship previously imposed on Taiwan by the Kuomintang, whose leaders fled China’s mainland in 1949. But, after eight years in power, the DPP is seen by many young people as the establishment. During Ms Tsai’s rule wages have grown slowly, housing has remained expensive and there have been power blackouts.
Pitted against Mr Lai are Hou Yu-ih of the now-democratic KMT and Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). In November Mr Ko and Mr Hou announced that they would team up. Were they to do so, polls suggest they might overturn DPP rule. But almost immediately the arrangement fell apart. The two parties could not agree which of their candidates would run as president and which as vice president. The TPP and KMT had earlier agreed to co-operate on legislative candidates to maximise their share of the island’s 113-seat parliament.
Mr Hou supports lowering cross-strait tensions through dialogue with the Chinese Communist Party under the “1992 consensus”: that there is “only one China”, but the two sides have different understandings of what that means. Ms Tsai’s predecessor as president, Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT, used this formula to relax cross-strait tensions. But China may not be as flexible as it used to be. In 2019 China’s leader, Xi Jinping, gave a harsh speech linking the 1992 consensus with the mainland’s “one China principle” and said Taiwan should be ruled like Hong Kong, which in theory operates its own political system, but where China has stamped out democratic freedoms. Mr Ko, who professes to be a centrist, is in touch with the Chinese authorities and says he has asked them to consider an alternative formula that would be less divisive than the 1992 consensus, which is reviled by the DPP.
A victory for Mr Hou or Mr Ko might lead to restored cross-strait communications and a superficial easing of tensions. But any Taiwanese president will have little control over the geopolitical fault lines that the island stands on, expressed in China’s military build up and its deepening rivalry with America.
Sources: National polls; The Economist
