Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Eric Chu/Facebook
AFTER SIX TIMES in which the KMT blocked the national budget for next year, the two parties have finally come to an agreement. As such, a consensus seems to have been reached on the budget.
In particular, the KMT made the issue of logging compensation on Indigenous lands into a point of contention with the DPP, taking issue with the fact that the national budget did not include such compensation. The issue was not previously widely discussed in Taiwanese society, including among Indigenous activists.
Consequently, it is probable that the KMT was simply looking for an issue of contention with the DPP to use as a pretext to block the national budget. And with regards to logging compensation on Indigenous lands, it is possible that the KMT was looking for a social justice frame with which to take issue with the national budget. Indeed, as the KMT has traditionally had a strong foothold in Indigenous local communities by way of clientelism and patronage networks dating back to the authoritarian period, the KMT may have also been looking for a way to strengthen such networks. Certainly, the KMT did mobilize Indigenous supporters to demonstrate in support of its budget block.
As the eventual passage of the budget took place through a concession to the KMT by the Executive Yuan, with the Executive Yuan agreeing to the KMT’s demands, the KMT sought to frame this as a victory. The KMT has tried to depict this as the party successfully defending the interests of farmers and Indigenous.
The DPP, for its part, mostly adopted a security frame when seeking to politically counter-attack the KMT regarding its budget block. The DPP pointed to that blocking the national budget included blocking Taiwan’s defense budget. Indeed, political contention about the budget took place in the same timeframe as the KMT taking aim at high-profile defense projects such as the domestic submarine program, insisting that the domestic submarine program is a waste of national resources and is dangerous for sailors, rather than the object of national pride that the Lai and Tsai administrations have framed it as being.
Photo credit: Eric Chu/Facebook
The true issue at hand, however, was the power of the executive branch to draw up the national budget, as specified in the constitution, not the legislature. In this sense, the Executive Yuan taking issue with the KMT was not truly about the specific issue of logging compensation for Indigenous either. Rather, the KMT can be understood as continuing its series of actions aimed at stripping away powers from branches of government it does not control and instead abrogating such powers to the legislature, the only branch of government it controls. Consequently, to resolve the deadlock, the Executive Yuan suggested that it would seek a constitutional interpretation over the issue.
The KMT’s efforts to arrogate powers from the executive and judiciary branches of government to the judiciary prompted the series of protests known as the Bluebird Movement earlier this year. As the KMT’s effort to expand legislative powers was blocked by the Constitutional Court, a proposal by the KMT now seeks to freeze the ability of the Constitutional Court to make judgments. The Constitutional Court may have ruled similarly with regards to the KMT’s efforts to expand legislative powers to the Executive Yuan’s constitutional right to draw up the budget.
Still, it is to be seen if the KMT has overplayed its hand when it came to blocking the budget. The KMT likely does not have the popular mandate to engage in the level of scorched earth tactics that it employed, particularly as it has lost three consecutive presidential elections and only holds a slim majority in the legislature in coordination with its political ally, the TPP.
That the KMT was not in a position to continually block the budget is reflected in that it did not truly triumph over the DPP in winning the concessions that it did–certainly if the hope was that the social justice frame would lead to popular support, this did not occur. In fact, continuing to freeze the budget altogether and potentially risking a constitutional crisis, would have likely led to blowback from the public. The KMT may otherwise be seen as backing down in the face of the DPP’s threat to seek a constitutional interpretation. Yet it is probable that this is far from the end of political contention between the DPP and KMT at present in the legislature.