Taiwan has voted: Lai Ching-te, the candidate China wanted to prevent at all costs, wins. It is quite possible that Beijing will now flex its muscles.
China sent fighter jets to start this election day. The Ministry of Defense in Taipei announced on Saturday morning that eight aircraft and a warship from the Chinese People's Liberation Army had been spotted near Taiwan in the past 24 hours. The polling stations had already been open for a good two hours and the first of the approximately 19.5 million voters had cast their votes for a new president and the 113 members of the Taiwanese parliament. Eight fighter jets, that sounds dramatic. But for a long time Beijing has been trying to intimidate the Taiwanese with such threatening gestures on a daily basis; In September, Taiwan's military once counted 103 Chinese fighter jets.
The Taiwanese people are not intimidated by China's martial gestures, as we could see once again this Saturday. The presidential election was won by the candidate that Beijing wanted to prevent at all costs: Lai Ching-te from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has been in power for eight years. Lai received a good 40 percent of the vote, which is enough to become president in Taiwan since there is no runoff between the two best-placed candidates. For the first time since Taiwan's democratization in the mid-1990s, a party can now elect Taiwan's president three times in a row (incumbent Tsai Ing-wen was not allowed to run again after two terms in office).
“I don’t care at all what the government in Beijing thinks about Lai and the DPP”
65-year-old Lai Ching-te, a former doctor and Taiwan's vice president for four years, entered the race as the favorite; almost all polls recently saw him in the lead, although with a small gap to the other two candidates. The fact that he won the election so clearly is not least due to the divided opposition: Hou Yu-ih from the Kuomintang (KMT) only got 33 percent, Ko Wen-je from the Taiwan People's Party (TPP), founded in 2019, got 26 percent. Both had actually wanted to run together, one as a presidential candidate, one different from his deputy. But at the last moment, Hou and Ko had a disagreement over the distribution of roles, paving the way for Lai Ching-te to enter the presidential palace.
In Zhongshan District in northern Taipei, Lin Chin-lung voted for election winner Lai of the DPP. “He stands for modern politics,” says the 22-year-old student. “The DPP introduced marriage for all“The other candidates, however, have repeatedly made negative comments about gays and lesbians,” he says. It doesn't matter to him that China wanted to prevent a President Lai. “Frankly, I don’t care at all what the government in Beijing thinks about Lai and the DPP.”
Taiwan's future president calls for “dialogue instead of confrontation”
In the past few days and weeks, Beijing has once again gone to great lengths to convince Taiwan's voters not to cast their vote for Lai, but rather for the more China-friendly KMT man Hou Yu-ih. The Taiwanese must “make the right decision,” the authority responsible for Taiwan in Beijing rumbled a few days ago, because there is “an extreme risk that Lai Ching-te will trigger a confrontation and conflict between both sides of the Taiwan Strait.” China views Lai as a separatist and still resents him for once describing himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence.” Beijing broke off all contacts with the government of President Tsai in 2016.
“As president, I have the important responsibility to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” Lai told reporters after his election. He will maintain the status quo “under the principles of dignity and equality.” In relations with China, “confrontation must be replaced by dialogue” and Beijing bears responsibility for this. In fact, it is China that is fueling the conflict. State and party leader Xi Jinping threatens that his country will never renounce the use of force to annex Taiwan.
With the hysterical warnings about Lai, the military threats and a flood of deliberately spread disinformation, Beijing has now achieved the opposite of what it wanted. It was very similar before: When incumbent Tsai Ing-wen stood for re-election in 2020, China used all force to crush the de
mocracy movement there in Hong Kong. The result was a landslide victory for Tsai – and led to a further deterioration in the relationship between the two countries. For Beijing, Tsai's DPP is an object of hate that she has been working on for years. It is provocation enough for China that Taiwan elects its own government, that the country is a living democracy and thus provides counter-evidence to Beijing's thesis that being Chinese and democracy simply do not go together.
Taiwan's election winner wants to work with the opposition
And now? Observers fear that China could soon respond to Lai Ching-te's victory with military maneuvers near Taiwan. Lai will also have to convince all those Taiwanese who did not vote for him – around 60 percent of the voters. The two losing candidates, Hou and Ko, called for dialogue with Beijing to reduce tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Lai also said he was willing to talk – “our door will always be open,” he said a few days ago in the direction of China. But it seems extremely unlikely that Beijing will soon pick up the phone when Lai calls.
And then there are the many domestic problems facing Lai. Rents in Taiwan are high, salaries are low, and the minimum wage is far too low. Taiwan may be one of the richest countries in Asia, but not all citizens have benefited equally from the economic rise of the island nation, which supplies the entire world with sophisticated microchips, and inequality is high. Added to this is the country's political division between Lai's supporters and the many opponents of the future president. The DPP also lost its majority in the Legislative Yuan, the Taiwanese parliament, and is now just behind the KMT. On the evening of the election, Lai called on the two losing candidates, Hou and Ko, to work together; Together we should find solutions to the country's problems.
Lai Ching-te will take office in mid-May. By then he must not only have found a convincing answer to China's threats.
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