After the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) retained its legislative majority as a result of the legislative elections, calls to abandon ideology and make room for reconciliation emerged.
Newspapers have reported that members of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) are calling for cooperation between the pan-blue camp and the “white” camp.
Although the KMT lost the Jan. 11 presidential and legislative elections, it holds 38 legislative seats and remains the second-largest party — and thus is the major opposition party — in the Legislative Yuan. The TPP won five seats and is a rising star.
Only if the two largest opposition parties join hands can they avoid becoming a silent “unimportant minority” in the legislature.
Very few people would disagree that calls for cooperation are natural and rational — it is common sense.
However, it is easy to talk about the necessity for cooperation, but it has in the past been extremely difficult for parties to truly become a positive opposition party.
This leads to the question of whether the pan-blue and white camps would be able to form an opposition alliance — here are some observations and possible consequences.
First, the KMT’s core voter base is shrinking. The party was formed by the politicians and military forces of a foreign regime, and its membership has been mainly comprised of military personnel, civil servants, public-school teachers and corporate leaders.
Their national identity is the Republic of China (ROC), a Chinese regime that occupied Taiwan with military force. They could not care less about Taiwan, and even take a hostile attitude toward Taiwanese culture and history, while the ROC that exists in their minds perished in 1949.
As these people die off, their descendants — second and third-generation mainlanders — become so-called “natural Taiwanese” (天然台), as they have grown up in Taiwan and accept it as their home — to a greater or lesser extent.
Just imagine how absurd it would be if a group of people in the US established a “British Democratic Party” that identifies with the UK.
Following this logic, if the TPP were to form an opposition alliance with the KMT, but the KMT did not break free from its “China obsession,” the national identity issue would become a stumbling block for the TPP when it tried to continue to garner support among young people.
Second, the TPP made a quite astonishing debut and made the jaws of many commentators drop when the party received 1,588,806 votes, or 11.2 percent of the political party vote, in the process gaining five legislator-at-large seats.
During its election campaign, the party did not present any special policies or governance ideals, and its stance on cross-strait relations was particularly ambiguous, revealing that its discourse is based more on opportunism than idealism.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), the TPP chairman, is reportedly well-versed in ‘Mao Zedong (毛澤東) Thought.’
Mao is famous for his political scheming and caprice, which has also caused the KMT a great deal of pain and suffering. It remains to be seen whether the KMT would collaborate with the TPP and once again fall prey to Mao-style scheming.
Third, when voters abandon their parties and lend support to a new political party, they tend to choose parties with similar ideas and views.
Just as former members of the New Party or the People First Party (PFP) chose to join the KMT, people that might leave the KMT are most likely to consider the TPP, and would be very unlikely to turn to the New Party or the PFP, because both parties lean even more toward China than the KMT.
The younger generation of “natural Taiwanese” would certainly not move in a direction opposite from where most of Taiwanese society is headed, and the opportunistic and ambiguous TPP is likely to be their natural choice.
While the call for collaboration between the pan-blue camp and the white camp is appealing, the combination could result in the KMT breaking up into smaller parties.
Based on these observations, the present circumstances are unfavorable for an alliance between the KMT and the TPP, as a forced alliance would only end in mutual destruction.
Huang Tien-lin is a former advisory member of the National Security Council and a national policy adviser to the president.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming
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