The Los Angeles Times
Date: September 14, 2015
By Julie Makinen
Imagine you’re a presidential campaign director. With just four months to go before
Nationalist Party candidate Hung Hsiu-chu, seen in July, has little support from voters in Taiwan, some of whom say they find her off-putting and unpresidential. (Sam Yeh / AFP/Getty Images)
election day, which of the following would you not want your candidate to post on Facebook?
A) She’s worried about the “sense of defeat” within your party.
B) She regards voters as complacent about the nation’s problems, comparing them to “frogs being boiled in water.”
C) She feels she can’t calm down, appeals for Buddha to help her, and says she’s going to lay off the trail for several days to “start a deep rethinking process.”
D) all of the above.
For the strategists in Taiwan’s Nationalist Party — also known as the Kuomintang, or KMT — scenario “D” is no hypothetical.
Democratic Progressive Party candidate Tsai Ing-wen speaks in Taipei, Taiwan, on April 15. (Wally Santana / Associated Press)
Democratic Progressive Party candidate Tsai Ing-wen speaks in Taipei, Taiwan, on April 15. (Wally Santana / Associated Press)
With autumn arriving, the establishment party’s campaign machinery had hoped at this point to be shifting into high gear, riding on its longtime dominance and the accomplishments of President Ma Ying-jeou, who’s termed out after eight years in office.
Instead, the KMT looks to be heading toward a historic defeat come voting Jan. 16.
The party of Gen. Chiang Kai-shek appears on track to lose not just Taiwan’s presidency, which has happened only once before, but is also in danger of forfeiting control of parliament. That would be unprecedented since Chiang and millions of his supporters lost China’s civil war in 1949 and set up a completely separate government on the island, 100 miles off the mainland’s southeastern coast. [FULL STORY]
