Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Lai Ching-te/Facebook
THE FIRST HEARING on impeachment proceedings against Lai Ching-te took place earlier this week. The move to impeach Lai takes place as part of Taiwan’s mounting series of constitutional crises. Among the many crises are the Executive Yuan’s refusal to countersign revenue allocation legislation to local governments passed by the KMT-controlled legislature, the currently frozen Constitutional Court, and the Executive Yuan’s framing efforts by the pan-Blue camp to roll back the Tsai administration’s pension reforms.
That being said, the attempt to impeach Lai is not going to get anywhere and is entirely a political stunt. The KMT and TPP do not have enough votes combined in the legislature to impeach Lai, which requires a 2/3rd vote. The vote also needs to be presided over by the Constitutional Court, which is currently frozen.
The KMT has framed Lai as overstepping his bounds as president, particularly regarding the Executive Yuan’s refusal to countersign revenue allocation. The KMT has also alleged that Lai has broken down the separation of powers between the legislature, executive, and judiciary in seeking to maximize executive power.
By contrast, the DPP would probably allege the exact opposite in response to the KMT. The KMT-controlled legislature has attempted to pry a number of powers from the executive and judiciary in the past two years. Contention about the national budget in the last two years reflects efforts by the legislature to pry the power of budgeting away from the executive branch and to appropriate it as a power of the legislative branch. Other powers that the legislature has sought include powers of investigation from the executive and judiciary, in the series of events that sparked the Bluebird Movement in 2024, policing powers from the judiciary through the proposal to revive the Special Investigation Division of the Ministry of Justice and subordinate it to legislative control, and media regulatory powers, as seen in proposals to subordinate the National Communications Commission to legislative control.
Indeed, the KMT seeking to impeach Lai–often with the claim that Lai is dictatorial–simply reflects another move in stark political partisanship in Taiwan. However, the last time that Taiwan saw similar gridlock between the executive and legislative was during the Chen Shui-bian administration, when the DPP held the executive for the first time ever in Taiwanese history, but the KMT remained in control of the legislature. In the course of Taiwan’s democratization, the only period in which the KMT did not control the legislature was between 2016 and 2024, in the years of the Tsai administration.
During the Chen administration, the KMT similarly alleged that Chen was dictatorial. That Chen was eventually jailed on corruption charges is seen as a successful precedent for ousting a DPP president and pushing the DPP out of power. Attempting to impeach Lai is seen as a way to build the perception of DPP corruption, as also previously seen with efforts to depict Lai’s predecessor Tsai Ing-wen, as corrupt over stock investments owned by Tsai, or initiatives of her administration as the push toward green energy and the development of domestically-produced vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is notable that with the impeachment of former South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol in the news, KMT chair Cheng Li-wun suggested in public comments that Lai was going down the same path. In spite of being the political party in Taiwan that presided over many decades of authoritarianism, the KMT seized upon a social media post made by the DPP Legislative Caucus’ Facebook account that expressed support for Yoon’s declaration of martial law at the time, suggesting that Taiwan faced similar internal threats. The post was quickly deleted and replaced with one stressing that it was, in fact, the KMT that had declared martial law in Taiwan and that the DPP did not wish to see martial law again in Taiwan, but the damage was done.
Even so, such comments by Cheng are ironic. For one, these comments are in fact somewhat threatening to Lai, in that prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Yoon. But it is, of course, Cheng who is seeking to meet with an unelected autocrat through her plans to meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping later this month. Cheng would also be circumventing Taiwan’s democratic institutions to carry out this meeting. It can broadly be expected that the KMT will also label measures of the Lai administration aimed at securitizing Taiwanese society as potentially dictatorial and deserving of impeachment.