Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: TPP/Facebook
THE TPP IS caught in a dilemma regarding a provision in the party charter that its legislators would rotate after two-year terms. The party previously pledged in the course of electioneering that the party would, unlike other political parties in the Taiwanese legislature, swap out its slate of legislators for other members of its party list after two years.
Reportedly, there are differences of opinion in the party on whether to maintain the rule or not. Hsu Cheng-hsien, one of the members of the TPP’s central standing committee, is thought to be among those who have taken a stand against the rule. By contrast, Cho Chih-kang, a party official in Keelung, has framed the two-year rule as a pledge by the party that it cannot walk back.
Although many of the party heavyweights have to date remained silent on the matter, it is to be expected that they would also hope to block the TPP’s two-year rule from taking effect, as a means of maintaining power. Among those who would be affected by the rule is current party chair Huang Kuo-chang. By contrast, TPP politicians who have not yet seen the limelight but are on the TPP’s party list may wish to see the rule take effect.
In particular, the TPP’s two-year rule is one of the experimental measures adopted by the party as a means of differentiating itself from the two mainstream political parties in Taiwan, the DPP and KMT. More generally, the TPP has sought to depict itself as a political party beyond traditional blue-green political distinctions in Taiwan.
Another one of the experimental provisions in the TPP party charter, then, was the measure that TPP members could simultaneously be a member of the TPP along with being a member of another political party. This provision was intended to signal that the political party was committed to being beyond green-blue distinctions but was rarely taken up by any party member.
Indeed, the TPP’s initial slate of candidates drew heavily from members of pan-Blue third parties that were splits from the KMT, such as the PFP and New Party, with fewer DPP members by comparison. As tensions rose between not only the TPP and DPP, but also the TPP and KMT, ahead of the 2024 presidential elections over negotiations on a possible joint presidential ticket between the TPP and KMT, it also proved politically untenable for there to be TPP members who were part of more than one political party, given the potential conflict of interest.
The TPP’s two-year rule was framed as a means of signaling transparency on the part of the party, in putting the party’s identity before that of any individual politician. Yet it is also self-apparent that the TPP differs from other third parties in that it is built around party founder Ko Wen-je, having established itself as a political party in order to back Ko’s unsuccessful 2024 bid for president. The TPP, emphasizing the party brand, rather than any specific politician apart from Ko, may have been a deliberate mechanism built into the party intended to prevent any rival from potentially challenging Ko for leadership of the party, by ensuring that TPP politicians could not build up their own political brands and would instead remain secondary to Ko.
Ironically, this is not the first time that the TPP has faced controversy because of the two-year rule. Previously, controversy broke out over the possibility that Lee Zhen-xiu would take up a seat as a legislator. Lee is originally a Chinese national married to a Taiwanese person, in that way acquiring ROC nationality.
The status of Chinese spouses of Taiwanese has increasingly been contested in the last six months, with the Lai administration moving to invalidate the permanent residency of Chinese nationals who have not given up their household registration, moving to enforce laws that were previously on the books but not acted on. Yet the matter proves more complicated with Lee, who would have to prove that she has not only given up her household registration, but also Chinese nationality in order to run for office.
Still, with Ko currently in jail on bribery charges linked to the Core Pacific City Mall, the fate of the TPP is increasingly contested. The party’s heavyweights have mostly been marginalized, with the exception of Huang Kuo-chang, and it is clear that the party is also looking for ways to maintain newsworthiness with Ko in jail through proposals such as livestreaming Ko’s trial, thereby allowing the TPP to continue to drum up outrage over Ko’s detention. The two-year rule could potentially prove damaging to the party if it results in the party swapping out its current slate for even less-known political figures.
Indeed, with the TPP having aligned closely with the KMT in the last two years on the KMT’s controversial initiatives aimed at accruing power to the legislature, the TPP’s brand is increasingly undifferentiated from that of the KMT, except for being a smaller pan-Blue party. In this sense, the TPP faces the fate of potentially becoming a “little Blue” third party that is not fundamentally different from the KMT except for being a smaller party. The ongoing recalls put this dilemma strongly into focus.