The DPP’s self-defeating shenanigans

Protesters are surrounded by police on Ketagalan Blvd

The pan-green camp must abandon strategies that can only alienate the segments of the polity it will depend on if it is ever to run the Presidential Office again 

After nearly four years of rebuilding a party that in 2008 had been reduced to a pale shadow of itself, former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has good reason to worry about the direction the party seems to be taking since she stepped down. 

While Tsai, for various reasons, failed in her bid to unseat President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in the Jan. 14 election, she demonstrated her vision and maturity as party leader, a role she had assumed on May 20, 2008, the day Ma was first inaugurated. 

On that day, few people would have thought that the DPP, after suffering resounding defeats in the legislative and presidential elections, and hit by scandals surrounding former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), could, a mere four years later, again present a credible challenge to Ma and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).

Tsai accomplished just that, giving hope to many that the KMT would not go unchallenged in what are challenging times for Taiwan. All those accomplishments are being threatened now by a party leadership battle that appears to have lost all sense of purpose and direction ... This reflex action was taken to an extreme when DPP legislators announced they would seek to recall Ma with little more than a week left in his first term in office. 

My unsigned editorial, published today in the Taipei Times, continues here.