Third parties made breakthroughs in Taiwan’s 2018 regional elections, but supporters are still left wondering what could have been.
The News Lens
Date: 2018/11/30
By: Dafydd Fell, Taiwan Insight
Credit: Reuters / Olivia Harris
Four years ago, on the eve of the last round of local elections in Taiwan, I wrote a piece looking at the prospects of smaller parties. Today I would like to reflect on what has changed and how we can best understand the challenger parties in 2018. Potentially small parties can play an important role in democracies. They often advocate policies and represent minorities that are neglected by mainstream parties and can bring diversity into political life.
Taiwan’s smaller parties had seemed to be in terminal decline from 2004 through to 2010. There was a small recovery as the People First Party (PFP) and Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) returned to parliament in 2012. However, a more important development appeared to be the Sunflower occupation of parliament in the spring of 2014. One of the causes of the wave of social protest during the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) era had been dissatisfaction with mainstream party politics and thus calls for a third force became much louder in society. I recall being on a panel with Sunflower leader Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) in the summer of 2014 in London in which at one point large sections of the audience shouted out “Form a Party.”
Credit: Reuters / Pichi ChuangActivists take part in a sit-in to mark the one-year anniversary of the start of the Sunflower Movement outside the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, Mar. 18, 2015.
The Nov. 2014 elections were held just over six months after the end of the Sunflower occupation so it looked like a historic opportunity to bring alternative voices into Taiwan’s local politics. In that election there were two types of small parties. The first were the splinter parties such as the PFP, New Party (NP) and TSU whose politicians had largely defected from the mainstream parties and tended to have a similar policy outlook to their parent parties. The second were alternative parties such as the Green Party Taiwan (GPT) and Trees Party (TP) that stressed a largely different set of issues and polices from the mainstream parties. [FULL STORY]
