by CHRISTOPHER ISETT
A Sunflower Movement protest in Taiwan on March 24, 2014 PHOTO/Louis Liu/Flickr
Taiwan’s recent election was a referendum on its past — and a battle for its future
On January 16, Taiwan held its sixth presidential and eighth parliamentary plebiscite since political liberalization in the early 1990s. Tsai Ing-wen’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won an overwhelming victory, vaulting Tsai to the presidency and giving the opposition party its first parliamentary majority.
The rout wasn’t surprising. Pre-election polls showed deep dissatisfaction among voters. Many saw the election as an opportunity to punish the Nationalist Party (KMT). A fifth of KMT supporters stayed home, and young voters turned their backs on the party entirely. Twenty-somethings not only went to the polls at higher rates, they voted nine to one against the KMT.
The party’s dramatic loss is, in part, the upshot of recent developments. After recapturing the presidency in 2008, the KMT tried to kickstart the economy by hitching the island’s export sector to China, which continued to grow despite the global downturn. In 2010, Taiwan signed the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement with China and the two countries began to liberalize cross-straits trade. Capital outflows to the mainland grew rapidly and China overtook the US as Taiwan’s premier market.
Today, the countries’ economic futures are linked tighter than ever. Yet growth has remained elusive for Taiwan, whose export-dependent economy has been in a funk since 2012. At the end of last year Taiwan’s economy actually shrank. Young people have been hit particularly hard, experiencing significantly higher unemployment than their counterparts in neighboring countries.
For a party that prides itself on its history of economic management, appearing to surrender the island’s precarious political autonomy while failing to deliver expansion proved disastrous.
But while the KMT’s economic record since 2012 is certainly disappointing in a country long accustomed to high growth rates, it doesn’t entirely explain the party’s stunning defeat or the recent electoral shake-up. There are bigger changes afoot in Taiwan.
The Sunflower Movement
Taiwan is a young and brash democracy, marked both by deep ethnic and class cleavages — a place where brawling on the legislative floor is par for the course, and political partisanship often spills onto the streets. Yet even by Taiwan’s overheated standards, the political temperature ran high in the run-up to the country’s recent elections.
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