|
Elections not true measure for 2012
By Chen Mao-hsiung 陳茂雄
Saturday, Aug 14, 2010, Page 8
Taiwan’s pan-blue and pan-green camps both see November’s
elections for mayors of five special municipalities as a warm-up for the 2012
presidential election. They think that if either major party wins all five
elections, it is bound to win the presidency. Failing that, they believe that
whichever party can win three or more of the mayoral contests will be in the
strongest position ahead of the presidential vote.
However, this way of thinking reduces human behavior to rigid mathematical
formulas; it doesn’t take account of the fact that people’s behavior can change
at any time. Both political parties should bear in mind especially that
infighting is sure to weaken either of them. In the southern cities of Tainan
and Kaohsiung, the pan-greens are definitely the stronger of the two camps, but
who can guarantee that the they will retain their advantage following the
divisions they are now experiencing?
After Kaohsiung County Commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興) expressed his
intention to stand in the November elections, challenging the official
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊), DPP
Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) rushed to Kaohsiung and had a 50-minute
tete-a-tete with Yang in the hope of dissuading him.
Undeterred, Yang went ahead and announced his candidacy on Monday. Tainan City
Mayor Hsu Tain-tsair (�?]), also of the DPP, looks set to stand as an
independent too.
Liao Wen-chen (廖文振), chair of the Friends of Hsu Tain-tsair, which has its
office in Tainan County’s Sibei Township (溪北), announced that the association’s
membership had already surpassed 100,000, the threshold that Hsu himself had set
for joining the race. Liao went on to say that Hsu would announce his candidacy
for the Tainan mayoral election tomorrow.
With Yang having resigned from the DPP to run in the election and Hsu very
likely to follow suit, both have become targets for fierce criticism from
pan-green supporters. The pan-green camp points out that both Yang and Hsu have
received a lot help from the DPP over the years, but instead of being grateful
and supporting the party, they are now damaging its prospects.
Such views may seem reasonable, but in reality they do not stand up to scrutiny.
A political party is no more than a group of people who get together to carve
out a certain political territory. Anyone can join the party at any time and
anyone can leave it whenever they want. Those who are nurtured by a party are
generally the ones who make the biggest contributions to it. Parties should try
to keep their outstanding members so that they can keep on contributing, rather
than condemning those who choose to leave.
Party members who choose to quit have their own reasons for doing so. Nobody
would leave a party if it better suited them to stay. Everyone knows that
politicians who quit the DPP do so at the risk of ruining their political
careers. The politicians themselves are surely aware of that. As for those
pan-green supporters who tell other people to sacrifice personal ambition for
the common good, their comments are always meant for other people’s ears. If
they ever found themselves in a similar situation, they would probably forget
about the need for sacrifice pretty quickly.
Most people do not realize how serious the DPP’s infighting really is. Party
factions were fighting each other before the primaries and they haven’t stopped
fighting since. Each faction is determined to crush its opponents. The Chinese
Nationalist Party (KMT) is no more of a stranger to infighting than the DPP, but
in the KMT there is more space for reconciliation, where as there is hardly any
in the DPP. The reason for this difference is that the two parties have
different types of supporters.
KMT supporters mostly vote for individual candidates rather than a party. When
splits appear between KMT politicians, the party’s supporters also split,
weakening official candidates and mavericks alike. Special circumstances apart,
KMT politicians who can’t work together would generally lose to their DPP
rivals. DPP supporters, in contrast, mostly vote for their party, not for
individuals.
Even when two rival pan-green candidates stand in an election, supporters will
flock to the stronger one. In other words, with the DPP, both victory and defeat
are complete and absolute. Whoever wins DPP primaries needn’t worry about the
runners-up, unlike the KMT, where those who win primaries need to garner their
rivals’ support or they’ll face a split vote and defeat at the polls.
In the run-up to the last mayoral elections in 2006, Taiwan Solidarity Union
candidate Lo Chih-ming (羅志明), looking for a dignified way to back out of the
Kaohsiung City race, expressed his willingness to negotiate with the DPP, but
people in the DPP decided that it would be enough to rely on voters dumping the
smaller party’s candidate and voting for their own, so they turned down Lo’s
offer.
As it turned out, they were indeed able to elbow Lo out of the way, but Lo’s
re-emergence in the following legislative election caused a DPP candidate to
lose in an electoral district where the party should have won. In the current
mayoral elections, the campaign teams of the official DPP candidates — those who
won the primaries — are again intent on crushing the runners-up.
The DPP’s infighting is not as fierce in other places as it is in Tainan and
Kaohsiung. The reason why it is so intense in those two places is precisely that
the DPP’s position there is so strong, so anyone it nominates is almost certain
to be elected.
If the DPP wins all five mayoral posts in the upcoming municipal elections and
its supporters draw the mistaken conclusion that the party is guaranteed to win
the 2012 presidential poll, then infighting could be so bad when the time comes
that the party’s campaign crumbles without the KMT having to lift a finger.
Chen Mao-hsiung is a retired National Sun Yat-sen University
professor.
|
