Cross-Straits issues no longer political dynamite
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On November 27, Taiwanese voters chose the leaders of the island's five most populous and economically most developed municipalities, including Taipei.
Yet, contrary to what some expected, the outcome didn't lead to a reshuffle of Taiwan's political landscape.
Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang (KMT) won in Taipei, Taichung and Xinbei, as the county surrounding Taipei will be called after it has been upgraded to a special municipality, while the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) kept Kaohsiung and Tainan, its strongholds in the south.
As the DPP won the popular vote by a 5 percent margin, there has been speculation that the ongoing process of cross-Straits reconciliation could be negatively affected.
To me, however, Taiwan's elections in five municipalities revealed the opposite: Only five months after Beijing and Taipei signed the landmark Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), there is a strong consensus in Taiwan that the ongoing process of cross-Straits reconciliation shouldn't be reversed.
The opposition may have hoped for the elections to become a referendum against the ECFA, but if so, this utterly failed. Resistance against the cross-Straits trade pact did nothing to help the election bids of the DPP's Su Tseng-chang and party chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei and Xinbei, respectively.
And the KMT's poor performance elsewhere wasn't even slightly related to cross-Straits relations. All of the KMT's mistakes in the elections in the five special municipalities were done on the local level.
In Taichung, the KMT's incumbent mayor Jason Hu won by a margin much smaller than expected solely because of a gangster-style shooting that occurred earlier this year. The incident caused Taichung to gain the embarrassing reputation of being Taiwan's "capital of organized crime." As the episode has since been gnawing on the city's self-esteem, Jason Hu inevitably lost his status of being one of the KMT's favorites.
In Kaohsiung, it was Huang Chao-shun who was thrown in as the KMT's candidate. She was decisively defeated by Mayor Chen Chu of the DPP. Given Huang's remarkable lack of charisma, this didn't come as a surprise.
Yet, an equally weighty reason for her disastrous performance was that the popular Yang Chiu-hsing, who defected from the DPP to run as an independent candidate, easily split the KMT's vote as he effectively hijacked the party's political platform.
