Politics abhors a vacuum, and with the KMT struggling for support there is scope for a new opposition to mount a challenge to the DPP’s grip of Taiwan’s national politics. But who will lead it and where will they come from? Courtney Donovan Smith forecasts Taiwan’s political future.

The News Lens
Date: 2017/09/25
By: Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文)

In my previous article “As KMT Digs Its Own Grave, DPP Plans Its Burial,” I explored

Photo Credit: Reuters/達志影像

how the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is on the one hand marginalizing itself with its own structural, historical and ideological straightjackets, and on the other is having much of its remaining power sources held over from the martial law era stripped away by the current administration of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

The marginalization of the KMT will open a huge political vacuum for new opposition to form to the DPP. There is no way to know for sure what form it will take, but that has never stopped anyone attempting to read the tea leaves. Whatever political forces emerge from the status quo in Taiwan, they will arise from an intriguing confluence of local political structures and personalities, international trends and economic changes, and take place against a backdrop of a nation straining to break away from the deep historical divisions that have so far informed its identity.
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