​Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP are headed for a historic victory in Saturday’s elections, and the battle has already begun to define the narrative about what that means. One fairly common refrain is that this likely outcome will presage a fundamental realignment of the party system around issues beyond the blue-green divide over cross-Strait relations.
 
I’m skeptical that we are about to see this kind of realigning election, despite the attention given to the campaigns of the so-called “Third Force” parties. I’m also skeptical that this result will be the death knell for the KMT as a political party capable of winning elections. The KMT's coming defeat clearly reflects deep unhappiness with Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT’s rule over the last eight years, intensified by a spectacularly ill-timed economic downturn over the last few months (at least if you are a KMT member!) But an unpopular leader, toxic party brand, and disillusioned supporters are not fatal to major party survival, as the DPP showed after its 2008 electoral thrashing. So while a KMT recovery is not assured, and will at a minimum require some major leadership shakeups, we shouldn't expect the party simply to fade away, and for all those pan-blue supporters (still at least 30 percent of the electorate) to suddenly become fans of the DPP or one of the new parties.

Of course, I could be totally wrong--I'm just some guy on the internet, after all. But either way, we'll know a lot more soon: elections have a nice way of splashing everybody with a cold dose of reality. The results of the election this Saturday will give us the most concrete evidence we'll have to evaluate these competing narratives. So, in the interest of intellectual honesty, let me lay out my own expectations about what will happen, and what it means. Beyond who wins and loses, here's what I'll be watching most closely to see where Taiwanese politics is headed.

What motivated President Ma to attempt to expel Wang Jin-pyng from the KMT last September? One possibility is that Ma was genuinely troubled by the compelling evidence in the influence-peddling case brought against Wang, and saw the revelations as a moment to take a stand against corruption within the KMT’s legislative caucus. It’s hard to square this theory with the inconsistent reaction of Ma to other cases of scandal in the KMT, though, as this blog post by Frozen Garlic notes.

Another possibility is that the dispute was personal. There’s ample evidence of a long-running Ma-Wang rivalry that goes back at least to the party chairman’s election in 2005, when Ma trounced Wang with over 70 percent of valid votes. As Ma prepared to run for president, Wang declined an invitation to run on the ticket as Ma’s vice president. So there may be some lingering animosity from this history. But this story isn’t very convincing, either. For one, savvy politicians rarely let personal feelings get in the way of political strategy—and those that do tend not to last in politics very long.

I think the answer lies elsewhere. If we think entirely in strategic terms, stripped of emotion and morals, there are two institutional reasons why Ma might have viewed Wang Jin-pyng in his role as speaker of the Legislative Yuan as a major impediment to his agenda, and thus sought to replace him with a more pliable figure.

1. Wang chairs the Cross-Party Negotiation Committee. The Cross-Party Negotiation Committee (in Chinese: 黨團協商, 政黨協商 or 朝野協商) is the body charged with resolving inter-party conflicts over legislative procedure. As this article details, it was created in the late 1990s in an attempt to reduce uncertainty and increase legislative efficiency, which had been disrupted by “wildcat” protests by opposition legislators. It came into force in 1999, the same year that Wang Jin-pyng became LY speaker, so its role is inextricably intertwined with Wang’s stewardship as the head of the legislature. 

As far as I have been able to tell, the CPNC is not well understood, even among Taiwanese political scientists who specialize in legislative politics. The basic rules (detailed here) are: 

• Every party caucus (which requires a minimum of 3 members) is allowed one representative, typically the party caucus whip.  
• The CNPC meets at the discretion of the LY Speaker; in practice this happens whenever there's a boycott or blockade in the legislature, which has happened at least 80 times in this LY.
• Discussions are supposed to be recorded or otherwise made public; this rule is blatantly and routinely violated.
• Any legislative action agreed to by all party representatives in the CNPC will not be opposed by individual members of each caucus, allowing for expedited reviews, votes, or other legislative actions.

I've not been able to identify any consensus about the ultimate effect the CPNC has on the conduct of legislative business. At one extreme, the CPNC could be working to formalize a minority party veto over all legislative action. That is, because all parties have to agree in the CNPC, even the smallest parties (the Taiwan Solidarity Union right now has only 3 members) could effectively block controversial legislation by withholding agreement in the committee.  That would require virtually everything to pass with the consent of all parties--an alarmingly high threshold for policy change.

At the other extreme, the CPNC could just function as a more formal version of the informal discussions that take place all the time between different parties in the legislature, and give no extra meaningful authority in practice to opposition parties.

The conversations I've had with people at the legislature suggest that the CPNC looks a lot more like the second situation than the first: to the extent negotiations in this body are meaningful, it is because the opposition parties are able to do things outside the CPNC to block majority action on legislation. And if negotiations in the committee actually were on the record, as the statute requires, the party leaders would simply move them out of that committee and somewhere else private.  Thus, the CPNC is not really the place where the president's agenda goes to die. If President Ma thought getting rid of Wang would gut the CNPC and streamline legislative action, he had the wrong target in mind.

2. Wang does not use police force to end opposition blockades.  Rather than in the Cross-Party Negotiation Committee, the opposition's power to block ruling party legislation lies primarily in its ability to occupy the speaker's podium, and thus to prevent legislative sessions from being gaveled in. As I noted in the previous post, this type of action is something like a filibuster, and it is not absolute; the KMT caucus ended one of these blockades by physically removing opposition legislators from the podium prior to the passage of ECFA in 2010. The inability of the KMT to repeat that success in recent months is probably because of dissension within the majority party caucus itself, rather than anything the opposition is doing differently.

A shoving match is not the only way the majority party could counter an opposition party blockade of the speaker's podium, however. The Speaker also has the authority to call in the LY's security force to restore order. As this article describes, the "sergeant at arms" power (警察權) has been used a total of six times, all before 1992 when the legislature was fully democratic (i.e. the majority of legislators were still permanent representatives of mainland China):

• 1988.12.06: DPP legislators objecting to the continued presence of permanent unelected "Eternal Legislators" (萬年立委) try to grab the microphone from the speaker, Liu Kuo-tsai (劉闊才), starting a fight. Liu calls in the police and throws the DPP legislators out of the chambers.
• 1989.07.04: As a protest against the unelected legislators, DPP legislator Wu Yung-hsiung (吳勇雄) stands at the presentation podium (發言台) and refuses to budge. Speaker Liu calls security personnel in to have him removed from the chamber.
• 1990.05.29: Hau Pei-tsun, the sitting Minister of Defense and a retired military general, is nominated to be the next premier by President Lee Teng-hui. During the confirmation hearing, the DPP criticizes the nomination, calling Hau the head of a new “military cabinet” (軍人組閣). (Until 1997, premiers had to receive LY confirmation before taking office.) During the confirmation vote, a physical altercation breaks out between KMT and opposition LY members, and Speaker Liang calls in security to restrain the opposition.
• 1990.11.06: DPP members are unhappy that Speaker Liang permits Premier Hau to give perfunctory answers to legislators (“敷衍兩句“). A fight breaks out while Hau's remarks are being read into the official record, and Liang again calls in security to quash the opposition’s protests.
• 1990.12.18: Upset at the KMT caucus's sudden change to the legislative agenda, the DPP caucus starts a group protest, and DPP legislator Wei Yao-kan (魏耀乾) unplugs the microphone while Speaker Liang is attempting to start the session. For the third time in a year, Liang calls in security personnel, who struggle to restrain DPP legislators and restore order. 
• 1991.04.12: The best-known incident: DPP legislator and future premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) approaches Speaker Liang at the podium, hands him a letter of protest, and then without warning lightly slaps him, telling him that this is a “wake-up call” from the Taiwan people. Furious, Liang orders security into the chamber. DPP legislator Lu Hsiu-yi (盧修一) rushes to defend Chang, ends up injured at the bottom of the scrum with the police, and is sent to the hospital. A few moments of the confrontation can be seen in the video accompanying this news story.

Given these precedents, then, during any of the dozens of times the opposition parties have occupied the podium over the last year, Wang could have used this power to have them removed. And this presumably would have allowed action on everything on President Ma's agenda, including the Cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement. So in a strictly legal sense, Speaker Wang has not used every weapon in his arsenal to ensure legislative action on executive priorities. He is allowing the opposition to block legislation without consequences. From Ma's perspective, then, a speaker more sympathetic to the president's agenda could use this power to end opposition blockades--thus, in all probability, the attempt to get rid of Wang. 

Ma Might Think Getting Rid of Wang Will Tame the Legislature. It Won't.
If we view the Speaker's authority over the legislature in its historical context, the picture is not nearly so simple. First, the sergeant-at-arms power has never been used in the democratic era. Taiwan today is a strikingly different place from Taiwan in 1991: most obviously, all legislators are subject to direct elections now. Calling in the police would be the political equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on the legislature. The opposition would no doubt go all-out to resist a police action in the legislative chambers and to play up the violence and drama, and the image of security forces dragging out opposition legislators would attract not only blanket domestic news coverage but probably also a great deal of opprobrium from abroad as well. 
 
It's also just not Wang's style--he's been able to survive as speaker in large part because he's viewed as a fair-minded and consensus-oriented leader, one of the few people who is well-connected and respected among both political camps. And even if Wang were in theory willing to entertain the idea, the fate of the last speaker to call in the police should give him pause: Liang Su-jung lasted barely over a year in the position before he had to resign. 

It's conceivable that, had Ma succeeded last September in expelling Wang from the party and creating a vacancy for the speaker's office, a Ma ally could have been installed in the position--someone like the KMT caucus whip Lin Hung-chih (林洪池). But he would face the same basic dilemma: he doesn't have the internal party unity to win a showdown with the DPP, and using the police to remove opposition legislators would impose a huge political cost. I'm skeptical that the KMT caucus would agree to bear that cost, or that they would support a nominee for speaker who was willing to impose it. 

Thus, removing Wang Jin-pyng from the Speaker's position was not likely to change the underlying situation much. Even if it had succeeded, I think Ma's attempt to purge Wang was a serious strategic miscalculation, and indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legislature works.    

Trouble in the Family (煮豆燃萁). The "Ma-Wang showdown" erupted into a full-blown political scandal in the past week.  On Sunday, news broke that phone surveillance by the Special Investigative Division (SID) of the Supreme Prosecutor's Office had been much more extensive than previously revealed.  The SID's wiretaps included the phones of other legislators besides Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘), the DPP's party whip and the office's initial target.  It also apparently included the legislature's central switchboard.  Even prominent KMT officials including New Taipei City mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫), Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-pin (郝龍斌), and Taoyuan County John Wu (吳志揚) are inveighing against the SID.   

The revelation has put the methods used to approve wiretapping under intense scrutiny, particularly by people who are well-placed to do something about it: the legislators themselves.  Suddenly, individual privacy and especially proper judicial procedure are hot issues for discussion.  

Besieged on All Sides (四面楚歌) At the center of the political storm is the SID's chief prosecutor Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘).  Huang is under fire for two separate issues: potentially overstepping the SID's authority to wiretap, and improper collusion with President Ma in the announcement of the case against Wang Jin-pyng.  

The Ministry of Justice has formed a task force to investigate the wiretapping allegations, and Huang has already been grilled by members of the legislature over the matter.  Then there is the separate leak investigation opened by the Taipei District Prosecutor's Office, for which Huang, President Ma, Ma's former deputy secretary Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強), and Premier Jiang have all been summoned to give testimony.  To complicate matters further, the Control Yuan (檢察院), an odd and increasingly irrelevant relic of the original Sun Yat-sen-designed constitution that is supposed to monitor government behavior, has joined the fun and broadened its own investigation of "improper influence" by officials.  In case you've lost count, that's three separate investigations that Huang Shih-ming has triggered in the past week.

With all the controversy swirling around him, Huang has not fallen on his sword to protect Ma Ying-jeou, either, doing little to dispel the impression that his actions were closely coordinated with the Presidential Office and seeming more interested in saving his own skin.  Ma’s popularity ratings are pretty dismal, registering at 15% in some recent polls.  Ma, for his part, has denied trying to influence the Special Investigative Division's actions.  

Schadenfreude (幸災樂禍).  All the scrutiny of Huang this week has crowded out the original story of possible malfeasance by Wang Jin-pyng and Ker Chien-ming.  Remarkably, Ker is now suing both Huang and Ma.  For his part, Wang won another court decision on Monday, sustaining his injunction against being expelled from the KMT.  The next step: the Supreme Court. If the injunction is upheld there, then Wang will probably survive through the end of the term, as his lawsuit against the KMT may not be settled for years.  

Lest the DPP gain too much enjoyment out of the KMT's turmoil, allegations of malfeasance against one of their own were also in the news this week.  Tsai Ying-wen (蔡英文), the DPP's former party chairwoman and 2012 presidential candidate, was censured by the Control Yuan for "dereliction of duty" in her role as vice premier in 2007.  Tsai approved government investments in a biotech start-up that totaled about US $1.4 billion, then later worked as a spokesperson for the company after leaving government.  Notably, the same Special Investigative Division that's now in hot water over wiretapping closed its investigation into the Tsai case in August 2012, finding no evidence of wrongdoing.  That fact plus the timing of the announcement suggests a possible political motive behind the decision, and may generate more interest in the DPP in abolishing the Control Yuan.   

All eyes on me.  The biggest news of the week continues to be the attempted expulsion of Taiwan's speaker of the Legislative Yuan, Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) of the KMT, by his own party.  Wang's fate depends on the outcome of a case now before the Taiwan High Court.  On September 12 the KMT's Central Evaluation and Discipline Commission (黨中央考紀會) revoked his party membership, apparently on orders from President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), for alleged "influence peddling" in a court case against DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘).  Because Wang holds an at-large seat on the KMT's party list, rather than a district seat, the party action against him was expected to force him out of the legislature.  But Wang's legal team managed to win a temporary court injunction against his removal on September 13.  

For the time being, Wang retains his seat but has been barred from participating in KMT party activities.  The attempt to expel him has laid bare some serious tensions within the ruling KMT, forcing a delay in the party's planned 19th party conference that was scheduled to begin on September 29.  

Gang of Five.  A weekly policy meeting of five key figures in the KMT--president Ma, vice president Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), KMT secretary-general Tseng Yung-chuan (曾永權), and legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng--will resume, with KMT legislative caucus whip Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池) taking Wang's place.  The move is one of several that appear intended to further isolate Wang and his allies in the party and consolidate president Ma's authority, as well as improve cooperation between the executive and legislative branches. Of particular note is that Wang's allies potentially include the former vice president and presidential candidate Lien Chan (連戰) and his son, Sean Lien (連勝文).

Can you hear me now?  Another bit of fallout from the "Ma axes Wang" (馬鍘王) affair with far-reaching political implications is the revelation that the Special Investigative Division (特別偵查組) of the Supreme Prosecutor's Office (最高法院檢察署) had been wiretapping the phones of DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming.  The evidence of Wang's intervention in the legal case against Ker was reported directly to President Ma, who highlighted it in his press conference announcing the party's disciplinary actions. That raises potentially troubling questions about prosecutorial independence, the appropriate use of secret wire-tapping and domestic spying, and the balance of power in legislative-executive relations.

On Wednesday, Ker got his chance to fire back when Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) testified before the legislature.  At least one KMT legislator is not so happy about the existence of wiretapping, either.  One thing to keep an eye on is whether more KMT legislators eventually push back publicly against the executive branch, or whether the shared interest in protecting the institutional authority of the legislature is trumped by party loyalty.

Give it a shot [奪力一搏].  The elections for the five special municipalities (直轄市) -- Taipei, New Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung, and Tainan -- aren't until late 2014, but there's already jockeying for the KMT and DPP party nominations.  The highest-profile race is in Taipei, where the incumbent mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) of the KMT is term-limited.  This week Wellington Koo (顧立雄), a lawyer and former advisor to the presidents Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian, confirmed he was interested in running on the DPP ticket.  Another name mentioned frequently is Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), a physician and chief of the intensive care unit at National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei--though Ko is not currently a member of the DPP.  Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) is also reportedly interested.  

For the KMT, Sean Lien (連勝文) is polling well but has not stated publicly whether he will will run.  The Taipei Times reports that four others have already declared their intention to seek the KMT nomination: legislators Alex Tsai (蔡正元) and Ting Shou-chung (丁守中), and Taipei City councilors Yang Shi-chiu (楊實秋) and Chin Hui-chu (秦慧珠).

In the New Taipei City race, former DPP premier Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃) announced this week that he would seek the party's nomination.  He joins former legislator Chuang Suo-hang (莊碩漢) as announced candidates.  New Taipei DPP party chief Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) is also openly considering a bid.  The incumbent mayor, Eric Chu (朱立倫) of the KMT, is eligible to run again but may run for Taipei mayor instead.  He is also frequently mentioned as a leading candidate for the 2016 presidential election.