Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Huang Kuo-chang/Facebook
HUANG KUO-CHANG WAS ELECTED chair of the TPP this weekend. Huang’s victory was by overwhelming margins, in that he defeated his only competitor, former legislator Tsai Pi-ru, by 8,903 votes to 360. As such, Huang won 96.11% of votes, while Tsai only won 3.89% of votes.
The election means that Huang will be chair of the TPP until December 2026, as the election was a by-election for the chair term vacated by party founder Ko Wen-je after he was jailed on corruption charges last year. The election saw 47% of 19,320 party members eligible to vote casting their ballots.
The election results cement Huang’s dominance over the TPP, then. Huang has sometimes been read as the biggest winner of Ko’s jailing, in that this created a power vacuum for him to fill. At the same time, part of Huang’s appeal to the party base may be that he has frequently invoked Ko Wen-je’s legacy, professing loyalty to him, and spearheading the party’s rallies in defense of Ko.
This occurs despite the fact that Huang is a relatively new entrant to the party. Huang joined the TPP only 14 months ago. Before his pivot to the pan-Blue camp, when chair of the NPP, Huang in fact had rocky relations with Ko, and so his victory occurs despite that some may have otherwise cast doubt on his loyalty to Ko and the party. By contrast, Tsai has been with the party since the beginning as an aide of Ko’s dating to before his political career, even if she faded from the limelight after resigning from her position as TPP legislator because of a plagiarism scandal.
Yet Huang’s triumph also occurred because of that other major figures in the TPP that could have potentially challenged him, or could have campaigned on the basis of longstanding personal ties to Ko, have not come out unscathed in the scandals faced by the TPP in the past half-year. Huang Shan-shan was previously a leading force in the party and even if she was made to take responsibility for the TPP’s issues with financial accounting, she maintained a strong relationship with Ko. But Huang’s efforts to keep the party together may have riled feathers, and with her status as a lawmaker and membership in the party suspended in the wake of the TPP’s financial woes, this prevented her from running.
Huang Kuo-chang. Photo credit: Huang Kuo-chang/Facebook
With an internally divided TPP, in which no major figures were able to challenge Huang, it is not surprising that Huang could become TPP chair in a victory by such large margins. As a male politician whose political persona is characterized by machismo, Huang’s stylings are in line with how the TPP support base is largely male. Ko’s appeal for them is often because of his frank, brusque, and politically incorrect statements.
At the same time, that Huang won by such large margins also points to the internal dynamics of the TPP. Namely, the party remains one whose political identity is largely built around Ko, seeing as the party was established to assist Ko in his 2024 presidential run. The TPP did not build up a stable of politicians that the public was aware of except as part of the TPP, and who had independent political brands of their own beyond Ko. So, too, with the TPP’s support base, which probably did not have any political loyalty to any of the TPP’s heavyweights except for that they supported and backed Ko. Indeed, the TPP’s politicians are largely former members of pan-Blue parties such as the KMT, PFP, and New Party, and they did not join the party out of loyalty to Ko, but to advance their own careers–yet paradoxically, they failed to become known in their own right by joining the TPP.
Even if Huang is probably not in the TPP out of any personal loyalty to Ko either, Huang has an independent political career not reducible to his contemporary support for Ko. Huang’s pivot from the pan-Green camp to the pan-Blue camp has proven a surprise, but either way, Huang was already a national-level political figure before joining the TPP. It is not surprising that he was able to outmaneuver and defeat other possible contenders for chair, then.
It is to be seen how Huang leads the TPP, then. With the TPP having sided with the KMT on most issues in the past year, including controversial attempts to expand legislative powers, freeze the Constitutional Court, and block the national budget, the TPP faces that it may become a “little Blue” party increasingly indistinguishable from the KMT except by virtue of being a smaller political party. This would effectively be the same challenge that Huang failed to navigate when he was chair of the NPP, leading to the eventual disintegration of the party, and so with his shift from the pan-Green camp to the pan-Blue camp, it is to be seen whether he navigates this challenge any better this time.