Taiwan’s Elections Aren’t All About China

Whatever the result, Taiwan’s election on Jan. 13 will be mostly about Taiwan, not China. Voters, as polling shows, are treating the election as a referendum on its outgoing ruling president Tsai Ing-wen’s domestic policies and public satisfaction over the ruling party’s governance over past few years, not a vote on Taiwan’s political identity or an expression of being “pro-China” or “anti-China,” as outside commentaries and reports have often assumed.

Nearly 20 million voters out of Taiwan’s population of 23.5 million people are eligible to vote on Saturday to elect their new president as well as all the seats in the Legislative Yuan—Taiwan’s unicameral parliament—for the next four years.

The presidential election is a contest between the Lai Ching-te, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party candidate and Tsai’s incumbent vice president; Hou Yu-ih, the opposition party Kuomintang (KMT) candidate and the incumbent New Taipei City mayor; and Ko Wen-je, the smaller third-party Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) candidate and former Taipei mayor.

As Taiwanese laws prohibit the publication of polls within 10 days of an election, there is a degree of uncertainty about the final state of the race. Polls published before this deadline, however, already provide plenty of clues as to how the election might play out.

Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation (TPOF) polls have closely tracked the state of the race and critical indicators such as Tsai’s approval ratings month-to-month during 2023. The final poll, conducted and published in late December, found that Lai, the DPP’s candidate, held a small lead over KMT candidate Ho, while TPP’s candidate Ko is further behind at third place.

A 4 percent lead in a three-way race is neither overwhelming nor insignificant. Combined with other polling data, I would forecast that Lai is slightly favored to win Taiwan’s presidential election. The opposition still has a decent shot if just some of Ko’s supporters coalesce around Hou on voting day, which might push him over the finish line. But given the composition of Ko’s supporters, a group that is predominantly made up of Taiwan’s youngest voters, who largely dislike both the ruling DPP government and the KMT, such strategic voting might not be enough to upset the race—if it happens at all.

Yet the polls show that the majority of Taiwanese public clearly wants a different ruling party; by last October, only 34.7 percent said they wanted the DPP to win and remain in power, while 53.5 percent said they would like to see a different government.

The fact that opposition voters are heavily divided among Ko and Hou in this election means that a Lai victory would not grant the DPP any public mandate unless Lai’s final winning margin surpasses all polling data by a considerable extent, which is unlikely to happen. Lai would only be a minority president, whose victory is the result of oppositions divided rather than coming from the support of absolute majority.

International media and pundits frequently report and comment on Taiwan’s elections and partisan politics exclusively in the context of the island’s relations with China. From this narrow viewpoint, a DPP victory would signal the Taiwanese public’s rejection of China and an embrace of a supposedly more pro-independence agenda, whereas a KMT victory would translate to a move toward closer relations with Beijing and/or a surrender of Taiwan’s resistance.

In reality, Taiwan’s elections are not always about China, and the public often cares more about domestic political issues and governance. The last presidential election in 2020 was indeed dominated by China-related issues, as the Hong Kong protests of 2019 generated a massive wave of Taiwanese public sympathy toward the anti-Beijing protesters as well as fear over Chinese encroachment, which enabled the DPP to win a decisive victory in that year’s presidential and legislative elections.

The 2024 election, however, is first and foremost a domestic one. Continuing from Taiwan’s last local elections in November 2022, in which DPP suffered a landslide defeat, Taiwanese media headlines and public discourse throughout 2023 have been mostly centered on Tsai and her governance, scandals involving DPP politicians, and domestic issues such as crime and the state of Taiwan’s economy.

Some notable scandals include academic misconduct among DPP politicians, such as DPP’s former Taoyuan City Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan, who was alleged to have committed plagiarism in his graduate thesis and had his degree embarrassingly revoked by National Taiwan University after an investigation. Inexplicably, Tsai promoted Cheng to become the vice premier of the government even after the scandal, which certainly did not help the DPP’s public image in this election cycle.

In another case, a DPP legislator named Chao Tien-lin, who positioned himself as a rising star who was tough on China, turned out to have had a yearslong extramarital affair with a mainland Chinese mistress. The scandal was another humiliation to the DPP, and Chao was forced to drop out of his reelection campaign. His district in Kaohsiung City is now considered a key battleground that the KMT has a chance of flipping.

Most important are Tsai’s approval ratings, which turned decisively negative in fall 2023 and only recovered partially in the last December poll. TPOF polls have found that a majority of the Taiwanese public was not satisfied with Tsai’s economic performance and domestic governance. As DPP’s Lai has been banking heavily on continuing in President Tsai’s direction to bolster his campaign, Tsai’s faltering popularity had also taken a toll on his lead in the polls.

All this plays not just into the presidency, but also into control of the 113-seat Legislative Yuan, where polls have found that the KMT holds a small lead over the DPP in both the district and party-list races. In Taiwan’s electoral system, district races account for approximately two-third of the total seats, and at-large positions account for another 34 seats. Taiwan also has several districts not proportional to population, including six seats reserved for the Indigenous population in Taiwan (out of which, according to the polling, the KMT is likely to win four) and three seats reserved for Taiwan’s outer islands (where the KMT is likely to win two).

All considered, the KMT is favored to win a majority of legislative seats, though the matter of whether it can win an absolute majority is still uncertain.

Ko, the former Taipei mayor, might not have much of a chance of winning the presidency, being stuck at third place in the polls; however, his party, the TPP, is almost certain to cross the minimum threshold (of receiving 5 percent or more of total party-list votes) and win at least several at-large seats in the legislative elections. Should the KMT or DPP fail to win an outright absolute majority, those few TPP legislators could form a key tiebreaker that in turn could give Ko, the TPP chairman, more significant legislative influence over the next four years, depending on which party wins the presidency.

Taiwan’s political system bestows a disproportionate degree of political power in the hands of the president, who as the head of state can also appoint or remove his or her own premier—the head of the government—even without the Legislative Yuan’s approval. While the cabinet ministers are nominally nominated by the premier, the president holds the ultimate power, since he or she controls the premier.

As such, a president whose party does not control an absolute Legislative Yuan majority can still exercise near total control over the executive branch and the cabinet, though the opposition will gain greater power to veto the ruling government’s wishes on budgetary and legislative matters.

This means that even if Lai or Hou win the presidency without their parties winning an outright legislative majority, there is still little, if any, incentive for them to form a coalition government with some cabinet ministers chosen from the opposition parties, even though Hou has promised to do so if elected president.

An opposition victory may not be as big a deal geopolitically as some expect. Many commentators and reports have assumed that a KMT victory (or a TPP victory under Ko) victory would lead to warmer cross-strait relations and therefore reduce military tension between Taiwan and China. While certain small progress in trade relations and symbolic political gestures could be expected if Beijing is happy with the result, there is little evidence to support the idea that China’s aggressive military posture and threats toward Taiwan would just magically go away if a certain politician or party wins.

In fact, past records suggest that China will continue to expand and improve on its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to build even more capabilities and preparedness for a potential war over Taiwan, regardless of Taiwan’s partisan politics. During former KMT President Ma Ying-jeou’s two terms from 2008 to 2016, the number of ballistic missiles deployed by the PLA against Taiwan increased steadily and significantly despite Ma’s posture as a very Beijing-friendly president and the cross-strait relations being widely perceived by international commentators then as warm, if not outright friendly.

There is also no evidence that Tsai and the DPP’s faltering popularity has changed the direction of the Taiwanese public’s political identity and preferences for its political future. A TPOF poll published in September 2023 found that the majority of those surveyed (48.9 percent) prefer a future of Taiwanese independence as opposed to maintaining the status quo (26.9 percent) or unification with China (11.8 percent). This means that Taiwan’s elected politicians and government, regardless of political party, will continue to face public opinion pressure to maintain Taiwan’s sovereign identity and reject any Chinese attempt to impose serious political negotiation, let alone a talk of unification.

Whatever the election result on Jan. 13, the next Taiwanese president and legislature will face more or less the same challenges that President Tsai and the DPP government have experienced over the past eight years: improving Taiwan’s economy and especially young peoples’ wages; reforming Taiwan’s heavily mismanaged military and bolstering its defenses facing the vastly superior Chinese PLA; and perhaps most important of all to the whole Asia Pacific region, finding peace with Beijing while not sacrificing the Taiwanese public’s desire for its own sovereignty and identity—as difficult as that is to accomplish.

Correction, Jan. 12, 2024: The previous version of this piece erroneously described Hou Yu-ih as the mayor of Taipei. In fact, he is the mayor of New Taipei City, a different municipality.