A travesty of democracy

More than four million voters went to the polls yesterday to elect 17 mayors and magistrates, 592 city and county councilors, and 211 township and village chiefs.  What were billed as the all-important local elections were the least clean in Taiwan’s brief democratic history.

As of the eve of the elections, district prosecutors across the country had looked into 2,248 cases of vote-buying.  The investigation into 52 cases resulted in indictment of 76 of the 150 suspects detained without bail for bribery to rig the elections.  Of those indicted 23 were Kuomintang members, against two of the opposition Democratic Party.  The rest were independents or with their party affiliation unclear.  That made a Chiayi district prosecutor-in-chief lament he never saw vote-broking on such a large scale in his career covering close to three decades.

The opposition party put an end to a long losing streak since 2004 right after President Chen Shui-bian’s reelection thanks to a sympathy votes cast by swing voters who believed he was shot at by a gunman in an assassination attempt orchestrated by Beijing.  That was no mean accomplishment, while it has yet to emerge out of the shadow of the disgraced former president, who was convicted of corruption and sentenced to life in the first trial earlier this year.  

But the Democratic Progressives did not claw back because they could offer a better political future for the electorate.  They did, solely because the ruling party had let down its supporters who elected President Ma Ying-jeou by a landslide in March last year.  Not just swing voters deserted the Kuomintang in droves but members of the ruling party stayed away from the polls in disgust over the poor track record the Ma government has presented over the past 18 months.

Only non-issues dominated the elections, made ever more important by Ma’s personal involvement in his campaigning for Kuomintang nominees as their party chairman.  One of them was an economic cooperation framework agreement between Taiwan and China, which has nothing to do with the administration of local governments.  Another was the beef war fought on the domestic front.  The opposition party attacked the government for allowing American beef and offal to be imported despite suspicion that they may cause mad cow disease by a one-in-billions chance. Instead, President Ma was castigated for “inconsideration” for hogging a freeway on his way to a barnstorming tour.  Character assassination and other smear tactics reigned supreme in the long electioneering by candidates of both parties.  Election bookmaking was as rampant as ever.

Ma made the elections a test stone for his party reform.  He wanted a very clean Kuomintang slate of candidates.  Fu Kun-chi, a Kuomintang lawmaker convicted of inside trading and sentenced to 10 years in jail, was vetoed as a nominee.  He ran as an independent for magistrate of Hualien and won overwhelmingly.  Ma stumped more than enthusiastically for incumbent Yilan Magistrate Lu Kuo-hua for reelection.  Lu lost.  The Yilan election was a barometer of Ma’s charisma as the top vote-getter.  It was Ma’s personal defeat.

Though keeping its three county chief executive posts in Pingtung, Chiayi and Yunlin and winning Yilan, the opposition party did not expand its voter support a great deal.  The Kuomintang retained control of 12 cities and counties.  Altogether 17 posts were at stake.  Fu won Hualien as an independent.  Ma, however, can take comfort that his insistence on the clean elections did not hand his party a fiasco inescapably due to his many almost unforgivable policy flip-flops.  

The only true losers in the unclean elections are voters who have looked forward to a real political reform. They had to admit no improvement was made in elections in Taiwan, which have remained a travesty of democracy.

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