DPP facing daunting task / Taiwan party must rebuild for March presidential poll after defeat

Source: Toshinao Ishii and Tetsuya Suetsugu / Yomiuri Shimbun Correspondents

TAIPEI--The landslide victory scored by Taiwan's opposition Kuomintang in a legislative election Saturday has dealt a stunning blow to President Chen Shui-bian's ruling Democratic Progress Party, which is seeking to win the March 22 presidential election.

Chen who completes his second and final four-year term in May, announced his resignation as DPP chairman to take responsibility for the crushing defeat. The onus is now on DPP presidential candidate Hsieh Chang-ting, a former premier, to rebuild the party in the run-up to the presidential poll.

The Nationalist Party now has more than the 76 seats--two-thirds of the total--required to call a motion to dismiss a president. The party is therefore expected to dominate the legislature for the next four years. Furthermore, if the Kuomintang can persuade just four legislators from other parties to cooperate, it will have more than three-quarters of the seats, a position that will enable it to amend the Constitution. At the same time, the election has scotched Chen's attempts to establish a new basic law envisaging an independent Taiwan.

The Nationalists' success in forging an alliance with the second-largest opposition party, the People First Party, and pro-Kuomintang organizations, including local interest groups, that pitched in for the Nationalist Party, helped the party win plenty of seats in single-seat constituencies. Its attack on the DPP's failed economic policies also bore fruit. For its part, the DPP played up the "China threat" and emphasized a distinct Taiwanese identity, but its strategy backfired, as this approach only served to highlight the Chen administration's incompetence in dealing with China.


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