The Kuomintang victory in Saturday's mayoral polls in Taiwan does not guarantee an easy ride for President Ma Ying-jeou in his re-election bid two years from now. But, analysts say, it will encourage the ruling KMT, led by Ma, to continue its engagement policy with the mainland, though perhaps slow it a bit.
In the weekend polls to elect mayors of five special municipalities, the KMT barely held onto three areas it controlled - Taipei and Taichung cities and Taipei county, which will now be renamed Xinbei city.
Although the opposition Democratic Progressive Party failed to get any more mayors, securing just its Kaohsiung and Tainan strongholds in the south, it was able to win 400,000 votes more than the KMT, a total vote share of close to 50 per cent, to 44.5 per cent for the KMT.
The result was a big warning to the KMT, which had an easy win over the DPP in the 2008 presidential election, in which Ma won 1.1 million votes more than the DPP's Frank Hsieh Chang-ting in the five municipalities.
Even KMT secretary-general King Pu-tsung sounded worried. 'The sliding vote share signals that the party needs to be on high alert from now on,' he said.
Some KMT legislators said mayoral elections were different from presidential elections in that the former focused on local administrative issues and the latter on national ones. But Liu Bi-rong, political science professor at Soochow University, said: 'No one can deny that the KMT is losing its support, and this will make Ma's re-election bid difficult.'
