My Take | KMT local election landslide is good news for regional peace
- Taiwan needs to play a more neutral role in the Beijing-Washington rivalry, rather than turning itself into a strategic outpost for the US
Just when people have left the Kuomintang for dead, it comes roaring back. A blue wave represented by the KMT has swept across Taiwan. Its landslide victory will offer a foretaste of the presidential election in early 2024. That’s bad news for the island’s secessionists and Washington’s professional troublemakers, but good news for cross-strait and regional stability, perhaps even world peace.
It’s been argued by Taiwanese pundits and others that the local elections – which covered six municipalities, 22 cities and counties with more than 11,000 local government posts up for grabs – focused mostly on local and livelihood issues, including President Tsai Ing-wen’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. But if so, voters simply didn’t take seriously the “China threat” drummed up by Tsai and her ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
After all, it was Tsai herself who turned the local polls into a referendum on her presidency. Throughout the campaign, she had made the case that she was all that stood between Taiwan’s democracy and freedom and a mainland invasion.
She repeatedly claimed only a DPP victory would save Taiwan’s hard-won democracy from being destroyed by Beijing. In a campaign video message shown on Thursday, Tsai explicitly called the weekend vote a referendum on her leadership, saying a vote for DPP candidates was a vote for her commitment to “take good care” of Taiwan.
But like her idol, former American president Donald Trump whose hand-picked candidates performed dismally in the midterm US elections, Tsai’s own preferred candidates also did poorly. She has resigned her party chairmanship.
The KMT managed to flip key mayoral seats in Taipei, Taoyuan and Keelung, and won control of 13 out of 22 cities and counties. It is also expected to win the election for the mayor of Chiayi City, which was postponed until December because a candidate unexpectedly died.
The KMT’s Wayne Chiang Wan-an defeated the DPP’s Chen Shih-chung to become Taipei mayor. Party colleague and incumbent mayor of the municipality of New Taipei City, Hou You-yi, also won by a decisive 27.8 percentage points over his DPP rival.