Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Green Party/Facebook
A NUMBER OF third parties, namely the New Power Party, Green Party, Obasan Alliance, and the Tatwan Statebuilding Party, held a press conference with Better Together for NextGen Taiwan late last month to call for strengthening legal provisions intended to allow for youth participation in politics.
In particular, calls focused on lowering the voting age to 18. Taiwan’s current voting age is 20, though those 18 or older can vote in national referendums. Individuals aged 18 can also serve in the military, but are not allowed to vote.
Taiwan has one of the world’s highest voting ages, as 90% of 190 countries have a voting age of 18. Ostensibly, lowering the voting age is bipartisan, with both the DPP and KMT voting unanimously by 109 to zero to lower the voting age in 2022, allowing a referendum on lowering the voting age to clear.
At the same time, the referendum on lowering the voting age was ultimately defeated in 2022. It may, in fact, be that the Taiwanese public disapproves of lowering the voting age.
In spite of rhetoric otherwise, the KMT is generally thought to disapprove of lowering the voting age to 18. In 2020, the KMT had fewer than 10,000 members under 40. Even if clearly able to win elections, the KMT has still struggled with support from young people in recent years, though the party claims that recruitment of youth is up.
As such, it may not be surprising that the KMT has been accused of seeking to prevent the voting age from being lowered in the past. In May 2015, KMT caucus whip Lai Shyh-bao attached the proposal for lowering the voting age to other draft proposals about other longstanding, debated voting issues such as that of absentee voting, preventing the proposal from advancing. A mere year after the youth-led 2014 Sunflower Movement, then-president Ma Ying-jeou also cited polls to argue against lowering the voting age in June 2015.
The assembled political parties specifically called for the passage of a Youth Basic Act, which would enshrine channels for youth participation in politics at both the level of local politics and the central government. Under such legislation, as proposed by the Executive Yuan earlier this year, mechanisms would be established for young people between the ages of 18 and 35 to participate in politics, so that the youth perspective could be represented. The central government would also be required to produce a white paper on youth policy, which would be updated every four years.
To this end, the political parties that called for the Youth Basic Act criticized the legislature for being quicker to pass legislation intended to benefit the elderly. Such criticisms hinged on the “Strong Generation” controversy from earlier this year. Specifically, TPP legislator Wu Chun-cheng came under fire for pushing through the Act for Promotion of Strong Generation Policies and Industrial Development into law, legislation that aimed to benefit the so-called “Strong Generation”–a term referring to individuals over 55 years old, who are still healthy and willing to work.
However, after the passage of the law, it was found that this led to 1.1 billion NT in government contracts being awarded to companies associated with Wu’s family members, including his wife, siblings, in-laws, and children. These companies or organizations were linked to the Strong Generation Association, which was run by Wu’s family.
Although the act originally enjoyed bipartisan support and was backed by the DPP, KMT, and TPP alike, Wu was accused of having only pushed for the act in order to ensure that his businesses would be able to gain financially. Wu later resigned from his position as legislator in the TPP. Generational splits, then, continue to be a substrate of the partisanship of Taiwanese politics.