The ruling DPP gets a drubbing in Taiwan’s local elections

Taiwan held local elections on Saturday, and the results are in. In what is officially known as the 9-in-1 elections (九合一選舉), Taiwanese voters chose from candidates for nine different local government positions, from mayors for the country’s six major metropolises to county magistrates and neighborhood- or village-level wardens at the smallest level.

The mayoral and county races — roughly equivalent to governor races in the U.S. — received most of the attention, with the opposition KMT (Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party 中國國民黨) cleaning up against the majority DPP (Democratic Progressive Party 民主進步黨).

The KMT won 13 of the 22 top-tier races, flipping the northern constituencies of Taipei, Taoyuan, and Keelung, prompting Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文 Cài Yīngwén), to step down as DPP chair for the second time during her presidency.

But it wasn’t all gloom and doom for the DPP, which increased its share of city councilors nationwide, as well as winning its first contest on the China side of the Taiwan Strait — a villager representative position in the Matsu archipelago, just a few miles off of the coast of Fujian.

Taiwanese people have only been voting for their mayors and other local officials since 1994, seven years after the 38 years of martial law under the authoritarian KMT government ended. The transparent, efficient, and unhackable paper ballot system it uses is a point of pride for Taiwanese voters.

#TaiwanElection #Taipei
4 pm voting closed! Public, transparent vote counting began by 唱票 —announcing the name of the selected candidate on each ballot! A Taiwan feature! pic.twitter.com/W7yk8ItsyM

— Yu-Jie Chen (@yujiechentw) November 26, 2022

In the last local elections, in 2018, Beijing-orchestrated disinformation was substantial, aiding the meteoric rise of pro-China Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜 Hán Guóyú) and mayoral candidates in Taichung and other cities that he stumped for. But this year, there was no noticeable uptick in interference from China. Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu (吳釗燮 Wú Zhāoxiè), never reluctant to call out Chinese interference, told reporters prior to the election that it was “possible that China is being very busy in dealing with its own domestic problems.”

Cross-strait ties weigh heavily on the presidential and legislative elections that also take place every four years — the next national elections will take place just 13 months from now in January 2024. But local elections are, well, more local, with comparatively mundane issues like education, drainage, and in the case of the city of Chiayi, whether or not to establish a red-light district, at the forefront.

In that sense, this year’s local elections were a return to the norm of keeping things local. International media coverage of the elections, which previously tended to view most Taiwan stories through a cross-strait lens, skewed toward a more local framing, and not without reason.

Taiwan’s growing foreign press corps

In an undeniable own goal for Beijing, the foreign press corps in Taiwan has grown dramatically since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when China began expelling foreign reporters and later not granting visas for others. Many of these reporters witnessed their first Taiwanese campaign rallies, vote counts, and victory/concession speeches, giving them firsthand experience in Taiwanese democracy that will stay with them even if China ends up letting them back in at some point. Considered from this perspective, China was definitely a loser in this year’s elections, even if the ethnic-Chinese-identifying KMT performed well.

The 2018 local elections effectively launched Han Kuo-yu’s presidential campaign, which ultimately failed due to his perceived closeness to China — as Kaohsiung’s mayor, he met with Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥 Lín Zhèng Yuè’é), prior to the unrest of 2019, as well as Liú Jiéyī 劉結一, then head of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office. Han told Taiwanese media that his China visit was merely an attempt to sell Kaohsiung produce to the larger market to the north, but voters did not seem impressed, handing Tsai a landslide victory in the 2020 presidential election.

This time around, KMT candidates were much quieter about ties with China, which in August conducted unprecedented military exercises around Taiwan, and which was also the source of the pandemic that upended life here in 2020, affecting countless lives and businesses. Taiwan didn’t allow non-residents entry until September of this year and only weeks ago ended mandatory quarantine for all people arriving from abroad. On December 1, it will end mandatory mask-wearing outdoors.

With roughly half of Taiwanese voters affiliated neither with the DPP nor with the KMT, this year’s elections highlighted their inclination to punish the party in power. As a young democracy,

Taiwanese voters have consistently shown their willingness to show the majority party that it cannot take their loyalty for granted. Unlike, say, the U.S., a massive segment of voters here vote to chasten the party that they may have voted into power the last time around, rather than voting blindly for one party.

Now that the local elections are out of the way, the upcoming national election looms on the horizon. In the coming year, two major dramas will unfold.

The road to 2024

KMT chair Eric Chu (朱立倫 Zhū Lìlún), who was handed a drubbing by Tsai in 2016, appears keen to run again. For Chu to secure the KMT nomination next year, however, he will likely have to get past Hou You-yi (侯友宜 Hóu Yǒuyí), the popular mayor of New Taipei City — Taiwan’s most populous city. KMT elders, including the last KMT president, Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九 Mǎ Yīngjiǔ), appear hesitant to back Hou despite his popularity, presumably because he’s too Taiwanese for the KMT, whose diehard supporters still think of the country as the Republic of China that arrived here in the 1940s, rather than as Taiwan.

On the DPP side, Tsai Ing-wen is ineligible to run again under Taiwan’s election laws. The DPP’s poor performance in this year’s election will likely translate to her having less of a say over who the party’s next candidate will be. The weakness of her faction among the fractious DPP only adds to her inability to steer the party past her presidency.

A year is close to an eternity in Taiwanese politics, but the front-runner at the moment is Vice President William Lai (賴清德 Lài Qīngdé), who riled Tsai by primarying her in 2019 when she was still reeling from the 2018 local election losses. Favored by DPP “deep green” voters who seek the dismantling of the Republic of China structure and establishment of a Taiwanese state, Lai has described himself as a “political worker for Taiwan independence.”

With Beijing expected to be occupied with putting out economic and social fires related to its COVID policy well into next year, a Lai candidacy or even presidency could offer a convenient excuse for more military intimidation of Taiwan.

Potential dark horse DPP candidates include former Taoyuan mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦 Zhèng Wéncàn) and Tsai’s previous vice president, Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁 Chén Jiànrén), both of whom lack Lai’s popularity and, more importantly, political networks. DPP candidates in this election cycle in southern Taiwan, where Lai is especially popular — he’s the former mayor of Tainan — touted his support of their candidacy.

Regardless of how things play out on either side of Taiwan’s political divide, one thing is clear: The competition for the post-Tsai era is now underway, and 2023 will be anything but boring.