The great-grandson of the late dictator Chiang Kai-shek has been elected mayor of Taipei, giving a much-needed boost to the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s struggling opposition party.
Wayne Chiang’s victory in the capital reassured the KMT that it still has traction if it puts forward popular candidates who can distract from the party’s lack of a clear and credible policy stance on China.
Saturday’s polls, where voters picked government heads and lawmakers on three local levels of government, dealt the ruling Democratic Progressive party its worst local election defeat in decades, as it retained control of only five of the country’s 22 municipalities, cities and counties. President Tsai Ing-wen resigned as DPP chair, acknowledging that the party had failed to inspire voters and needed to “thoroughly review and reflect”.
However, analysts cautioned against reading the results as a broader shift in public sentiment that could push the DPP — vilified by China as the main obstacle to unification — out of power in presidential and legislative elections in January 2024.
“The election results will give the KMT a lot of confidence, but if they believe this means that their positions are now more popular with the electorate than the other party’s, they are probably mistaken,” said Nathan Batto, a research fellow at Academia Sinica in Taipei. “All the polling data we have points to the picture that the KMT is far less popular than the DPP, and their positions towards China are far less popular than the DPP’s. They just have a lot more popular local politicians in office right now.”
The KMT’s support rating dropped to a historic low of 14 per cent in July in a poll from National Chengchi University, compared with 31 per cent for the DPP’s, while Tsai’s support is holding at about 45 per cent, strong for a president towards the end of their second term. The fact that a majority of Taiwanese do not identify as Chinese and no more than 10 per cent would consider unification with China are also at odds with the KMT’s Chinese nationalist tradition. National identity and the threat from China normally drive national elections in Taiwan.
In Taipei, Chiang defeated the DPP’s Chen Shih-chung, a former health minister who led the central government’s pandemic control effort, and Huang Shan-shan, deputy to the current mayor Ko Wen-je of the smaller Taiwan People’s party.
Although Chiang Kai-shek ruled Taiwan as a dictator for decades after losing the Chinese civil war and fleeing to the island, his complicated legacy has not hindered his great-grandson’s political career — the two-term lawmaker has a strong female following and is often treated as a celebrity.
“Symbolically, this is a very important win for the KMT,” said Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Chengchi University in Taipei. He added that while Wayne Chiang’s family pedigree makes him unelectable for Taiwanese nationalists and those whose families suffered under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship, it deeply resonates with much of the KMT base, who continue to identify with the Republic of China, the state that was toppled in the 1949 Communist revolution but whose constitution Taiwan continues to use.
“He really is the kind of politician the KMT needs,” Nachman said. Young by KMT standards at 43, Chiang’s record as a lawmaker has been uncontroversial as he aligned himself with mainstream positions on social welfare, backed marriage equality and steered clear of the KMT’s radical pro-China wing.
But analysts believe the most important impact of Saturday’s elections will be its influence on which presidential candidates the two main parties pick for 2024.
Batto said the DPP’s defeat and Tsai’s resignation from the party leadership was likely to reduce the president’s control over the candidate race, allowing vice-president William Lai from the party’s more hardline pro-independence wing to slide into the nomination unopposed.
In the KMT, Hou You-yi, the incumbent mayor of New Taipei City, who is seen as the party’s best bet at winning the next presidential race, won re-election with 62 per cent of the vote, 5 percentage points more than 4 years ago.
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November 27, 2022 at 11:43AM
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Taiwan's Kuomintang boosted by local election results - Financial Times
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