What defines a democracy?

[GrayMouser]

Okay, my (adopted) country's turn to have an electoral crisis...

We just had a Presidential election, which the incumbent leader Chen Shui-bian, won by a narrow margin of 30,000 votes out of about 8 million cast.

President Chen is the leader of the Democratic Progressive Party(DPP),
a pro- independence party, and is also supported by the Taiwan Solidarity Union, a smaller, more radical group.

The opposition is a coalition between two parties,the Nationalist Party (known as the KMT from it's Chinese name, Kuo Min Tang), led by former Vice-President Lien Chan
and the Progressive Freedom Party(PFP), which was founded by James Soong after he broke away from the KMT in the 2000 elections. Both of these groups are anti-independence, and call for an eventual reunification with China.

The DPP/TSU are known as the Greens, while the KMT/PFP are the Blues.

The opposition have demanded a recount AND a new election- they claim that there was corruption in voting.
This time around there were more than 300,000 spoiled ballots, almost three times as many as in 2000.

The DPP says that was due to a campaign by a left-wing activist group urging voters to spoil their ballots to protest the lack of difference in social policy between the two parties (sort of the Ralph Naders of Taiwan ) and a tougher vote-counting law passed by the KMT-controlled Legislature in 2002.

More serious is the claim that President Chen faked an assassination attempt on himself, as both a sympathy ploy and an excuse to put the Armed Forces on alert, preventing (generally) pro-Blue soldiers from voting. The KMT claims that this affected 200,000 servicemen; the DPP says it was only about 13,000, fewer than in the previous election.

The speculation around that is really bizarre- for one thing, neither the Pres or VP Annette Lu noticed that they'd been shot at first- Chen with a grazed stomach, Lu with a lightly damaged knee;
-nobody heard the shots because of the firecrackers
- there was a delay in notifying the local police
-the spent shell casings were found by a local shopkeeper on a section of street where a police car had been parked, and they weren't found until after the police had left.
-the presidential driver drove to a private hospital out of town which happened to be owned by a DPP supporter, instead of the very good public hospital nearby.

And so on.

There was a massive demonstration of half-a-million opposition supporters on Saturday (peaceful, thank God), but nobody can predict how it's going to turn out.

It's been a big boost for China, which as well as making snarling threats to 'intervene to protect social order' has seized on this as an excuse to indefinitely postpone democracy for Hong Kong.

A right mess all round

[Jonathan]

Thanks for posting about the crisis in Taiwan. I have been following the news about the crisis in the papers but it was nice to get the same information directly from a Taiwanese.
Interesting what you say about how the democracy of Hong Kong is affected and threatened.

I hope things turn out good and that people can agree on what to do – accept the outcome of the election, recount the votes or have a new election.

May I ask whether you root for the Greens or the Blues?

[GrayMouser]

Actually, I'm not Taiwanese- I'm a Canadian living here, though I am a permanent resident and my wife is Taiwanese.

I tend to be pro-Green. They are the party that struggled for many years for democracy to end the one-party dictatorship of the KMT, leaders jailed, assassinated etc.

OTOH, they tend to have a strain of narrow-minded 'nativist' thinking that causes them to promote one ethnic group and their own local dialect.
Also, being inexperienced they made a lot of mistakes in their first four years of power (though it doesn't help that the Legislature is controlled by the opposition)

As well, there's always the fear that they'll go too far and we'll wake up one morning to Chinese missiles crashing down around us.

And my wife is strongly pro-Blue, so I have to watch what I say