But that won’t matter much for the time being
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| By: Jens KastnerTaiwan on November 26 is to hold elections for hundreds of city, country, and township positions, with surprisingly little at stake for a government seemingly under constant threat from an increasingly belligerent opponent across the Taiwan Strait. The opposition Kuomintang (KMT) is expected to outperform the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, although reading too much into that scenario can be perilous. As the historical track record shows: in 2018 the KMT won big in local polls with a 9 percent margin but reversed that sharply in 2020 nationally, with a 20 percent margin for the DPP as China’s crackdown on the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement shifted Taiwanese public opinion abruptly back to the DPP. The ongoing election campaign, in conjunction with a constitutional referendum to lower the voting age from 20 to 18, has been driven much more by name recognition and personal attacks than policy discussions, with the main battlefield being the races in Taipei City and Taoyuan, the latter a rapidly growing area in the capital city’s periphery. In Taipei, Huang Shan-shan of the outgoing mayor Ko Wen-je’s Taiwan People's Party (TPP) is running against the KMT's Chiang Wan-an, a purported great-grandson of the late former President Chiang Kai-shek, and the DPP's Chen Shih-chung (the former health minister who orchestrated Taiwan’s internationally lauded covid-19 response). In Taoyuan, DPP lawmaker Cheng Yun-peng seeks to safeguard DPP control mainly against former premier Simon Chang of the KMT…
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