Life after Tsai: The state of Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party

Following stunning losses by Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in last November’s local elections, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文 Cài Yīngwén) resigned from her party’s chairship on election night, a move that ushered the country into a new political moment. Now that Vice President Lai Ching-te (賴清德 Lài Qīngdé) has taken the position of party leader and a cabinet reshuffle is underway, the DPP and Taiwan are beginning to grapple with what a post-Tsai era will look like. (She would be ineligible to seek a third term when her presidency ends in 2024.)

“There’s a growing level of uncertainty,” said Kharis Templeman, a researcher at Stanford’s Hoover Institute.

The DPP is in a difficult situation. It only captured five out of 22 local leadership positions in last year’s elections. Polling from the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation two weeks ago found that the party’s popular support has fallen to 26%, seven points lower than before the election. That’s only 5% higher than the two leading opposition parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), both of which have recently seen moderate increases in popularity.

Last December, a special team led by former Taoyuan mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (郑文灿 Zhèng Wéncàn) identified loss of support from young people and moderate voters as key to the party’s defeat. Their report said the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, allegations of the party’s ties to crime, and a number of plagiarism scandals all impacted the party’s performance.

Still, the DPP controls the government, with 61 of the Legislative Yuan’s 113 seats. What might the future hold for the party in the short term?

The new person in charge

It will be up to new party chair Lai to make the DPP competitive again. On January 15 Lai won the chairship after he ran unopposed, signaling a level of consensus regarding his role in the party’s future.

In many ways, Lai is the clear choice. He’s the party’s most popular figure, with a January poll finding that almost 60% of the public trusts him. His career flourished during the eight years he served as mayor in southern Taiwan’s Tainan City, one of the DPP’s major bases of support. “Lai is closer to the median DPP voter,” said Templeman, the Stanford researcher.

But it’s not just about the voters. According to Shih Cheng-feng (施正峰 Shī Zhèngfēng), a professor at National Dong Hwa University, Lai needs the party leadership position to cultivate the connections necessary to become the party’s presidential candidate in 2024. Shih adds that Lai does not yet have the full support of his faction, New Tide (新潮流 xīn cháoliú), and control over party resources and candidate nominations may help win others over.

Two open questions remain for Lai’s leadership: what will be his management style, and what will be his position on cross-strait issues?

Party management

The DPP’s success nationally throughout the Tsai era has been in large part due to her careful management of the party’s factions. “The big split in the [DPP] is not over ideology, but the spoils of power,” Templeman said.

“Tsai has been masterful at managing intra-party competition,” he added. When Tsai took over as party leader in 2012, factional struggles had damaged the DPP’s image and performance. The situation became so severe that in 2006 the party banned factions, though they continued to operate unofficially. This changed after Tsai took control. Especially following her victory in the 2016 presidential election, she began distributing key positions to different factions according to their size and strength. This prevented factionalism from coming out into the open.

The question is will Lai continue this method. According to Templeman, Lai demonstrated in 2019, when he surprised the party by challenging a then-unpopular Tsai to be the DPP’s 2020 presidential candidate, that he may not have patience for the slow consensus-building that characterized the past six years.

For now, the party has mostly stayed quiet. Shih, the professor at Dong Hwa University, believes if factional struggle will return, it would likely be between Lai and Tsai. “Everyone else is still deciding what they’ll do,” he said.

Relationship with China

Lai’s approach toward cross-strait relations will also be important if he is to use the party leadership position to become its 2024 candidate. Lai started his career in Tainan as a politician supportive of Taiwanese independence, a position that has left some in Washington worried.

But Shih said he has moderated his positions as he’s moved into national politics. In 2017, Lai softened his tone, saying he wanted to be friendly with China while loving Taiwan. Then in 2019, when he was trying to differentiate himself from Tsai in the primary, he said he wanted to “peacefully protect Taiwan,” a phrase that has resurfaced following the party’s 2022 loss.

After his election to the chairship, Lai clarified that his position toward independence is that Taiwan is already a sovereign, independent country, and that there is no need to declare independence. His language mirrored Tsai’s in her 2021 national day address.

Lai’s shifting rhetoric reflects the decline of Taiwanese independence discourse in the DPP. While the question of independence was important in the 1990s, polls have shown that support for independence hasn’t exceeded 10% in the public for decades. For Shih, any remaining pro-independence forces in the DPP are focused on internal politics. “I believe that today’s Taiwan independence forces are more centered on removing and replacing the KMT and any remaining influence from the descendants of those who came after 1949,” he said.

Tsai’s influence isn’t over

The party’s machinations may be most visible in the cabinet reshuffle. Fifty-three percent of Taiwanese supported the formation of a new cabinet after the election, and replacing the executive’s leadership could be an opportunity for the DPP to change direction.

On Friday, Tsai officially appointed former Vice President Chen Chien-jen (陈建仁 Chén Jiànrén) as premier. Chen remains one of the most popular DPP politicians and the most likely to challenge Lai to be the party’s candidate in 2024. The premiership could be an opportunity to make his case to the party.

The president will likely have a major role in deciding the party’s direction after her term ends — to say nothing of her influence on the global stage, as recently evidenced by her recent telephone call with Czech President-elect Petr Pavel. Over her 10 years leading the party, Tsai has created her own network of cadres, and she is trusted by centrist voters and Washington. These factors give her significant leverage within the DPP.

The DPP was known as a social democratic party that pursued pro-welfare policies in the 1990s. That impression has changed. One of Tsai’s first major policy initiatives in 2016 was pushing through a controversial pension reform. Her administration has been unable to slow down the rapid rise in home prices and failed to raise the minimum wage to NT$30,000 ($990) per month as she promised before her election. Templeman said a new social welfare push could revitalize the party’s prospects in future elections.

It seems the party agrees. New premier Chen says his cabinet will focus on strengthening the social safety net and infrastructure in traditionally marginalized areas like the countryside.

Shih remains doubtful about any substantive policies. He said Tsai won her first election with the energy of the sunflower movement. Her 2020 victory was buttressed by a fear of China following the 2019 Hong Kong protests. But he said the party has already begun using the public purse to build support among special interest groups.

And he added they may decide to continue with this strategy, especially as Taiwan undergoes what he sees as a political realignment where the two major parties are losing support and the number of independent voters is growing. “This is now their tactic,” he said.