The split over a proposed joint ticket bolsters the governing party candidate’s chances in the coming presidential election. That won’t please Beijing.
For weeks, Taiwan’s two main opposition parties were edging toward a coalition, in a bid to unseat the island democracy’s governing party in the coming presidential election, an outcome that Beijing would welcome. The election, one elder statesman from Taiwan’s opposition said, was a choice between war and peace.
This week, though, the two parties — which both argue that they are better able to ensure peace with China — chose in spectacular fashion to go to war against each other. An incipient deal for a joint presidential ticket between the long-established Nationalist Party and the upstart Taiwan People’s Party unraveled with the speed, melodrama and lingering vitriol of a celebrity wedding gone wrong.
A meeting that was opened to journalists on Thursday seemed to have been meant as a show of good will within the opposition. But it featured sniping between rival spokesmen, a long-winded tribute to the spirit of Thanksgiving by Terry Gou — a magnate turned politician trying to cajole the opposition toward unity — and mutual accusations of bad faith between the two presidential candidates who had been trying to strike a deal: Hou Yu-ih of the Nationalist Party and Ko Wen-je, the founder of the Taiwan People’s Party.
Mr. Gou tried to break the icy tensions at one point by saying that he needed a bathroom break.
“I don’t want a silent ending on this Thanksgiving Day,” he later told journalists after Mr. Hou and his two allies had left the stage. “But unfortunately it looks like it will be a silent ending.”
Friday was the deadline for registering for Taiwan’s election, which will be held on Jan. 13, and by noon both Mr. Hou and Mr. Ko had officially registered as presidential candidates, confirming that there would be no unity ticket. Mr. Gou, who had also thrown his hat in the ring, withdrew from the race.
Taiwan’s young, vigorous democratic politics has often included some raucous drama. Yet even experienced observers of the Taiwanese scene have been agog by this week, and baffled as to why the opposition parties would stage such a public rupture over who would be the presidential candidate on a unity ticket, and who would accept the vice presidential nomination.
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