Taiwan’s 17 remaining official allies, along with its larger unofficial friends, make for strange bedfellows.
The News Lens
Date: 2018/11/08
By: Stellina Chen
Taiwan’s 17 remaining official allies, along with its larger unofficial friends, make for strange bedfellows.
On Oct. 28, Brazil elected far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro to its presidency. In the aftermath, Twitter was full of messages of grief, concern, and condemnation from observers around the world fearful that the populist, who has expressed his support of torture and his disdain for democratic norms, would threaten Brazil’s democratic society. However, there was a notable exception:
We congratulate @jairbolsonaro on his victory in #Brazil’s presidential election. The government and people of #Taiwan look forward to stronger relations across the board with the world’s 4th-largest democracy.
Of course, congratulating the victors of foreign elections, as Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) did following Bolsonaro’s triumph, is a perfectly normal and time-honored tradition.
U.S. President Donald Trump, when under pressure for congratulating Russia’s Vladimir Putin following his March 2018 victory in an election judged by international observers to be unfair, notably pointed out that his predecessor, Barack Obama, did exactly the same in 2012. [FULL STORY]
