Taiwan’s New Political Era Stuck in Gridlock

TAIPEI, Taiwan —  This island is beset by a crisis of inexperience.

Its 5 1/2-month-old government is led by a party that had never tasted power and is stumbling from one embarrassment to another, including the recent resignation of the prime minister.

Its legislature is controlled by an opposition party that has no idea how to be an opposition party after 51 years in power, a reign that ended in humiliation when voters threw it out.

Such bewilderment on both sides has produced a deadlock that has marred Taiwan’s first democratic transfer of power and sparked a constitutional nightmare with the threatened ouster of Chen Shui-bian, the island’s new president.

Chen, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, is Taiwan’s first leader from outside the ranks of the Nationalist Party, which ruled this island virtually unchecked after being driven out of mainland China in 1949.

The optimism that greeted his inauguration in May--the dawning of a new political era, many thought--has evaporated. His opponents might launch a recall effort against him this week. In an extraordinary public address, Chen went on national TV on Sunday to apologize for his missteps.

“As the country’s leader, I still have a lot to learn, and I have to make many adjustments,” he said.

Those adjustments include what Taiwan’s 23 million inhabitants--who are fed up with the relentless partisan bickering--have identified as the most pressing challenge facing them.

That wouldn’t be the island’s continued rivalry with China, despite the obsessive attention given the standoff by the international media.

Instead, the Taiwanese public has virtually forgotten about cross-strait tension and is focused on an issue even closer to home than the mainland: the economy.

Taiwan’s stock market has taken a thorough thrashing since Chen entered office, plunging to a 4 1/2-year low last month before rebounding somewhat. Investor confidence has crumbled. One oft-cited report concludes that $10 billion in investment has fled the island.

The fledgling government recently proposed a series of measures to repair the damage, including a pledge not to raise taxes for four years and to eliminate the business tax on financial institutions.

Yet even one of the government’s own spokespersons predicted that the plan probably would not work because of the hostility between the Nationalists and the DPP. Their mutual mistrust has spawned a poisoned atmosphere in which the government is unable to enact its initiatives and the opposition seems more intent on political point-scoring than offering a credible alternative.

The enmity has climaxed with the Nationalist attempt to throw Chen out of office. A party lawmaker announced recently that he had gathered enough signatures in parliament to launch a complicated recall process against Chen for his part in scrapping construction of Taiwan’s fourth nuclear power plant.

Although some analysts consider the recall threat a bluff, Chen’s foes insist that they will proceed when the time is right, possibly Tuesday. The fatal crash of a Singapore Airlines flight bound for Los Angeles last week prompted opposition lawmakers to back down--at least temporarily.

But the political dust-up over the scrapped nuclear plant has already claimed one high-ranking political figure: former Prime Minister Tang Fei, who resigned Oct. 3.

Chen had tapped Tang, a onetime general and a Nationalist stalwart, to lead a government of national unity, drawing ministers from both sides of the aisle.

But from the start, the Nationalist rank-and-file branded Tang a traitor for accepting the post, an accusation that dogged him in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, a raucous chamber where fistfights still break out. Despite losing the presidency, the Nationalists retain control of parliament.

“They still say they’re the majority party in the Legislative Yuan and should form the government,” said Jaushieh Joseph Wu, deputy director of the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University in Taipei. “They think that this is their show--they’re calling the tune.”

Tang was able to accomplish little, and he found himself increasingly at odds with the man who appointed him. The final straw came when Chen overruled Tang and shut down construction of the nuclear power plant, a project that the Nationalists had long favored but that the DPP had vowed to scrap for environmental reasons.

Chen has turned to a fellow DPP member, Chang Chun-hsiung, to replace Tang. Analysts say the hostility between the DPP and Nationalists could escalate without Tang as a buffer.

“The KMT seems to be in no mood to cooperate,” Wu said, referring to the Nationalists by their traditional initials.

Critics accuse the president of incompetence and of refusing to work with them even though he won Taiwan’s top job with just 39% of the vote.

“He’s the kind of person who doesn’t want to share power, not only with the party in opposition but within his own ranks,” said Ma Ying-jeou, the Harvard-educated mayor of Taipei and a Nationalist Party member.

Opinion polls show that Chen’s previously high approval ratings have been halved since June, in large part because of the economy’s spiral. Before Chen took office, Taiwan’s important semiconductor industry had already slumped, dragging down both investor and consumer confidence.

But the Nationalists have little to celebrate. In the presidential election, voters chucked them aside because of perceptions that they had ossified into a corrupt, unresponsive clique. Their own poll ratings remain stuck in the basement.

Ma acknowledged that a promised overhaul of the party “has been too slow--so slow that people don’t have any feeling of an ongoing reform process.”

In parliament, the Nationalists have yet to figure out how to be a constructive opposition, not just an obstructive one that “irrationally opposes the policies of the government,” Ma said. “Otherwise, the loss of the DPP doesn’t mean the gain of the KMT.”

At the same time, the DPP is plagued by its own internal divisions, particularly over the issue that has defined its existence but that has been overshadowed by concerns about the economy: Taiwanese independence from China, which considers the island a renegade province.

Fed up with Chen’s conciliatory gestures toward the mainland--which still refuses to deal with him--hard-core DPP members have demanded that the party stick to its pro-independence roots.

It has not helped party unity that Chen’s own vice president, Annette Lu, regularly makes pronouncements that inflame Beijing, which calls her “scum.”

“We don’t think the [DPP] legislators always have the same opinion . . . [but] we have party discipline,” said Wilson Hsin Tien, the party’s director of international affairs. “If you look at the United States, it’s the same. Do you think every congressional Democrat will take the same positions?”

Comparisons with U.S. politics are a popular pastime, especially now that the new Taiwanese government is presenting its budget to parliament for approval. Some observers see parallels with the 1995 budget showdown between President Clinton and the Republican-dominated Congress, which forced a temporary shutdown of the federal government.

Tien likes the analogy because it was Congress, not Clinton, that got blamed.

“Sometimes when you do things like that, you get burned,” he said.

For now, the DPP is unwilling to enter into any kind of coalition government with its foes. Its officials dare the Nationalists to call a vote of no confidence in the government, a move that would trigger a general election in which the Nationalists could conceivably lose control of parliament, their biggest remaining trump card.

The political calendar calls for legislative elections at the end of next year.

Experts say that Chen might try to ride it out until then. The DPP is already exploring the possibility of joining up with some of Taiwan’s smaller political parties to increase its overall share of seats in parliament.

But 14 months is a long time in politics. Hedging his bets, Chen has met recently with his most serious rivals--Lien Chan of the Nationalists and James Soong of the new People First Party--to try to bring down the temperature.

Still, no one expects any immediate rapprochement or significant reprieve from the island’s political paralysis.

“The government here in Taiwan,” Wu said, “is in for some tough times ahead.”