I have a new commentary out today at the Brookings Institution's U.S.-Taiwan Quarterly Analysis series on the aftermath of Taiwan's recall elections and what it means for the next 2 1/2 years of politics. I didn't get this observation into the piece, so let me just say here that in 25 years of watching Taiwan elections, the complete defeat of the recall votes is one of the most surprising outcomes I can remember -- perhaps second only to Han Kuo-yu's stunning win in Kaohsiung in 2018. I was way off in my predictions about the recall outcomes, as were most of the other analysts I followed. It's a good reminder that Taiwan voters are a fickle bunch, and to approach our analyses with a healthy dose of humility.

Anyway, the opening paragraphs are below: 

For the last 18 months, Taiwan politics has been out of equilibrium. The sweeping defeat last month of the attempt to remove 24 Kuomintang (KMT) legislators in a “great recall” demonstrated at least one incontrovertible truth: divided government is not going away. Taiwan’s political combatants now have an opportunity for a political reset. Let us hope that they seize it.

Political Uncertainty Drives Partisan Conflict
Taiwan’s previous elections in January 2024 delivered an ambiguous verdict. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) retained control of the executive branch but lost its majority in the legislature, while its primary opposition, the KMT, won a plurality of 52 seats (plus two allied independents) to the DPP’s 51. Far from indicating a strong mandate from the voters, however, the KMT’s victory rested on close wins in marginal constituencies and significant electoral malapportionment: across all districts, the party’s candidates won only 40% of the vote to the DPP’s 45%. Complicating matters further, for the first time in Taiwan’s democratic history, the balance of power was captured by a centrist party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), founded by former Taipei mayor and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je. This unprecedented situation injected additional uncertainty into Taiwan politics and contributed to the rapid escalation of partisan conflict over President Lai Ching-te’s first year in office.

​For the rest, see the Brookings website. 

Also, a side note: in putting this piece together, I was struck by how much good English-language coverage there is now on Taiwan politics. So much so, in fact, that I wasn't initially sure I had anything original to say after so many others got there first.

So here I just want to give a shout-out to the growing roster of outlets and people doing good work on Taiwan politics, including: 

• Journal of Democracy, which published an online exclusive by Raymond Kuo which I found especially thought-provoking. 
• The Diplomat has had a lot of good coverage of the recalls featuring a variety of perspectives. 
• Jamestown China Brief on the recalls and the stakes for the KMT. 
• GTI Brief -- including some great work by Ben Levine. 
• Taiwan Insight, which had a whole special issue on the recalls. 
• FPRI -- especially pieces by Brendan Flynn and Joshua Freedman. 
• Financial Times has regular original stories on Taiwan issues, thanks to Kathrin Hille's dogged reporting. 
• Bloomberg, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal now all have reporters based locally doing good work. 
• Foreign Affairs even published something on domestic issues in Taiwan for once, even if they did give it a troll-y title as is their habit. Excellent work Lev and Wei-Ting for surviving the FA editorial process! 

And on top of that, we've got Taiwan-based outlets that have expanded and deepened coverage too, including: 

• Taipei Times, which now has not one but two regular columns, by Michael Turton and Courtney Donovan Smith. 
• The inimitable Frozen Garlic blog by Nathan Batto.
• New Bloom and the extremely prolific Brian Hioe, who apparently never sleeps. 
• Domino Theory. 
• Commonwealth Magazine. 

And too many others to list...

I can remember back in the Ma Ying-jeou era when English-language coverage was maybe a tenth of what it is now, and quite a bit shallower. I was going through old notes of that period recently and they reminded me of the parlous state of commentary on, for instance, the Sunflower Movement. So I find myself marveling now at the richness and diversity of English-language writing on Taiwan. I know I learn a lot from you all, so...thanks, and keep up the good work.   

I'm very late with this, but here's my attempt to make sense of the mass recall elections happening tomorrow in Taiwan. In all, there are 24 KMT legislators facing joint recall elections on July 26, and another seven on August 23. Taiwan's recall rules have a double-passage requirement: (1) at least 25 percent of eligible voters must vote yes, and (2) yes votes must be greater than no votes. This requirement was changed in 2016 by the DPP majority with support from the NPP (and current TPP leader Huang Kuo-chang), which lowered the threshold from a 50% turnout requirement.  

According to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act, public officials cannot face a recall attempt until at least one year into their term. Since the current legislators were seated on February 1, 2024, the clock didn't start ticking on the recall campaign until February 1 of this year. But the threat of a recall of legislators was brewing much earlier, as early as June 2024 with the "Bluebird Movement" rally against the legislature's attempt to exercise more power over the executive branch. In response to this rally, KMT members started talking publicly about raising the recall threshold to something closer to where it was before; one proposal was that the "yes" votes must exceed the votes the representative received in the previous election, which would have made the current mass recall strategy all but impossible. One of the puzzles of this legislative term is why the KMT never actually followed through on this proposal, which would have saved them the trouble of defending all their legislators right now.

I have my own thoughts about that here -- I think the TPP probably blocked this change. But for this post I want to consider what would have to happen for the LY to flip control to the DPP, and how likely they are to do that. 

The DPP currently sits at 51 seats, and it needs to be at 57 for a majority. The simplest way for the party to reassume control is to recall KMT legislators and win the following by-elections in at least six districts. That would give the DPP the majority for the rest of the LY term. 

The second, temporary way is to succeed in recalling at least 12 KMT legislators; they're required to leave as soon as the votes are certified. So if any recalls pass, there will be a reduced number of legislators in the LY until the by-elections are held. If at least 12 are recalled, the total of KMT+TPP+2 blue independent seats will temporarily fall to 50 or less, handing the majority to the DPP for up to 60 days before by-elections are held and new legislators seated.

It is quite possible the recalls fall short of the 12 needed to shift control to the DPP immediately, but more than the 6 that could flip control if the DPP wins all the by-elections. That then sets up a hotly contested set of races in 30-60 days for the by-elections, and leaves the KMT+TPP temporarily still able to control the majority, but facing down up to another two months of uncertainty about their majority. 

Why are the recalls happening now? This has been an option since 2016, and recall elections have been held against three pan-green legislators in the past, so why is the recall mechanism only being employed as a mass campaign tactic now? To my mind, the most compelling answer is a series of strategic mistakes by the KMT over the last 18 months.

First, the 2024 election results did not deliver a decisive win for the KMT in the legislature. The headline number was the party winning 52 seats (plus two allied independents) to the DPP's 51. But if we look under the hood, the party actually came in 2nd in the party list vote, with 34.6% to the DPP's 36.2%, and in the constituencies, the KMT's vote share was five points behind the DPP's: 45.1% to 40.0%. It is only thanks to the disproportionality built into the electoral system that the KMT ended up with a plurality of LY seats at all. 

Second, this plurality was built on narrow wins in several marginal constituencies. Here's the list of 13 KMT legislators who were elected with less than 50% of the vote: 

• Taipei 4. Lee Yen-Hsiu. 47.6%. TSP won 11% here to split the pan-green vote.
• Taipei 8. Lai Shih-bao. 47.5%. TPP candidate won 15.4%. 
• New Taipei 7. Yeh Yuan-chih: 46.1%. Obasang Party candidate won 9% here.
• New Taipei 8. Chang Chih-lun. 42.7%. TPP candidate won 20% here. 
• Taoyuan 1. Niu Hsu-ting. 48.44%.
• Taoyuan 2. Tu Chuan-Chi. 48.2%. Tu beat the DPP candidate by ~1000 votes. 
• Taoyuan 6. Chiu Jo-hua. 40.93%. Three-way race with independent and TPP candidate, no DPP challenger.
• Keelung City. Lin Pei-yang. 43.6%.
• Hsinchu County 2. Lin Si-ming. 44.52%. NPP and DPP candidates split the rest. 
• Hsinchu City. Cheng Cheng-chien. 35.2-31.9% for the DPP candidate. A TPP candidate won most of the rest. 
• Nantou 2. Yu Hao. 49.8-47.3% over the DPP candidate. 
• Yunlin 1. Ting Hsueh-chung. 47.8-46.1% over DPP incumbent Su Chih-fen. Margin of about 3000 votes. 
• Taitung. Huang Chien-pin. 34.8-31.6% over DPP challenger. Former DPP legislator Liu Chao-hao won most of the rest. 

And here's a couple other seats that flipped to the KMT but were close races and are potentially vulnerable to a reversal:

• New Taipei 12. Liao Hsien-hsiang. 50.8-45.0% over DPP incumbent Lai Pin-yu. 
• Taichung 4. Liao Wei-hsiung. 50.0-47.4% over the DPP's Chang Liao Wan-chien.  
• Taichung 5. Huang Chien-hao. 51.55%.
• Taichung 6. Luo Ting-wei. 52.1%. 

By my quick and dirty count, that's already 17 legislators who should have entered this term pretty worried about the next election -- and by extension, about the recall happening tomorrow.

Given how shaky the KMT's plurality win in the 2024 election was, I've been surprised that these legislators in marginal districts have not been a more powerful moderating influence on the party caucus over the last 18 months. In particular, it was not helpful to their re-election prospects for the KMT caucus to immediately make Fu Kun-chi and Han Kuo-yu the faces of the party in the legislature: both are deeply polarizing figures widely reviled by the pan-green camp. Fu Kun-chi served a prison term for insider stock trading, then got out, got back into the legislature, and then in 2024 was made caucus chair. Han Kuo-yu was the KMT's presidential candidate in 2020, when he got crushed by Tsai Ing-wen, and then recalled a few months later as Kaohsiung mayor. One of the key purposes of party leaders is to protect vulnerable legislators, and the KMT has not done a great job of that.  

Third, as everyone knows now, the KMT's control of the LY depends crucially on the support of the TPP. I have gradually come to suspect that the TPP's collaboration with the KMT hasn't been as consistent or as sincere (rather than tactical) as a lot of DPP supporters are making it out to be. The TPP has publicly opposed the recall elections, but they haven't been willing to play institutional hardball on recalls in the same way they have with the constitutional court and oversight laws. I think some TPP members would be secretly fine if a few KMT legislators lost their recall campaigns. 

What this adds up to is a legislative majority built on sand. It was always a risky political strategy for the KMT party caucus to be so aggressive in confronting the Lai administration. And if they lose their plurality tomorrow, here's why. 

​There are three big moments in the last 18 months that really galvanized this recall movement. The first was the decision to insist on the legislative oversight bill as the top priority of the KMT and TPP, and to pass this package as soon as President Lai had taken office. Some of the changes included in these amendments were reasonable, and the DPP had even advocated for in the past; other parts (especially the requirement that the President give a state of the union address and take questions from legislators) was obviously unconstitutional. So the pan-blue opposition really decided to be aggressive right from the beginning, and they had to know that this would end up challenged by the Lai administration and its fate determined by the Constitutional Court.  

But then in October, when much of this package was indeed ruled unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court, both the KMT and TPP immediately sought to retaliate for the decision and voted down all of President Lai's nominees, leaving the court without its full complement. They then piled on and changed the Court Act to require a 2/3 quorum to meet, and the votes of at least 9 justices in favor of invalidating a law. That decision dramatically raised the stakes of the power struggle with the executive branch, and it led to a sense of a budding constitutional crisis. 

​Now, to be fair, there is a big problem with the court's appointment system: members are appointed for 8-year terms, non-renewable, and so the court is now filled entirely with Tsai Ing-wen appointees! It's easy to argue that it's a partisan court given that design. And with its decision to invalidate much of the oversight legislation, there was no reserve of goodwill from KMT-TPP to give Lai's court nominees the benefit of the doubt. 

But the KMT also sought to attack the court for a previous decision that narrowed the scope of the death penalty, which was a deeply cynical political calculation. It's worth pointing out that the Constitutional Court's ruling was based in part on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the KMT majority itself ratified and adopted as Taiwan law in 2009. Here's what Article 6, Clause 2 of the ICCPR says: 

The court didn't have much choice in this case if it was following the letter of the law. And yet the KMT then decided to accuse the court of overriding the will of the Taiwan people, because the death penalty remains popular in Taiwan. That may have been politically advantageous, but it was both hypocritical and morally repugnant.  

​The third ​big moment came in December, when the LY took a hatchet to the Lai administration's budget proposal. Again, the opposition's political strategy here in hindsight does not look great: they took aim at lots of budget items without much forewarning or justification, and they managed to tick off a lot of constituents reliant on that funding who they didn't need to make mad. It was quite clear at the time that both the KMT and TPP were simply looking for things to cut to make life hard for the central government. 

They also made a critical messaging mistake: they also cut items in the budget for the Ministry of National Defense. Yes, they targeted the indigenous submarine program, which the KMT has been critical of (for good reason) for a long time. And yes, the overall amount frozen and cut was not a large share of the MND's overall budget. But the optics were terrible -- when you're trying for the next six months to explain to foreign interlocutors that you're not "anti-defense" or "pro-China," just anti-DPP, you've already lost the narrative battle.   

Since the rules were changed in 2016, seven recall elections have made it to the actual voting stage. Here's what happened in each one. 

Huang Kuo-chang (NPP) in New Taipei 12. 16 December 2017.
Yes: 48,693
No: 21,748
Turnout: 27.75%
Yes threshold: 63,888​
Result: Recall failed. Yes votes came in 15k below threshold, although yes beat no. 

Han Kuo-yu (KMT) as Kaohsiung Mayor. 6 June 2020.
Yes: 939,090
No: 30,169
Turnout: 42.14%.
Yes threshold: 574,996 votes. 
Result: Recall passed. Yes votes came in almost 400k votes above threshold. KMT side mostly boycotted this vote. The DPP's Chen Chi-mai easily won the by-election. 

Wang Hao-yu (DPP) as city councilor in Taoyuan (SNTV district). 16 January 2021. 
Yes: 84,582 
No: 7,128
Turnout: 28.14%
Threshold: 81,940
Result: Wang recalled. 

Huang Jie as city councilor in Kaohsiung (SNTV district). 6 February 2021.
Yes: 55,261
No: 65,391 
Turnout: 41.54% 
Threshold: 72,892
Result: Huang survives easily, yeses fall 17k short, and no beats yes.
​
Freddy Lim (Ind, formerly NPP) in Taipei 9. 9 January 2021.  
Yes: 54,813
No: 43,340
Turnout: 41.93%
Threshold: 58,756
Result: recall fails by about 4000 votes. 

Chen Bo-wei (TSP) in Taichung 2. 23 October 2021.  
Yes: 77,899
No: 73,433
Turnout: 51.72%
Threshold: 73,744
Result: passed by about 4000 votes, Chen removed. But DPP candidate Lin Ching-yi won the by-election, 52-47%. 
​
Hsieh Kuo-liang (KMT) as Mayor of Keelung. 12 October 2024.
Yes: 69,934
No: 86,014
Turnout: 50.44%
Threshold: 77,700
Result: recall fails -- yes falls about 8k votes short, and no beats yes by 16k 

What I take away from these seven races:
 
Meeting the turnout threshold is still hard. Both Huang and Lim survived because the opposition couldn't drive enough "yes" voters to the polls. Chen Po-wei and Wang Hao-yu both lost but even in those cases the "yes" votes were barely above the required threshold. The only "yes" vote that was a blowout was Han Kuo-yu in Kaohsiung -- and he's arguably a special case since he was by that point a national figure and his polarizing campaign for president had ended just six months before. 

Partisan green-on-blue still matters. When turnout was high-ish, it was because the recall triggered dueling mobilization of DPP and KMT partisans. That saved Huang Jie (in green Kaohsiung) and Hsieh Kuo-liang (in blue-ish Keelung). If the generic partisan tendency of the electorate leans against the KMT, the incumbents should be worried. If it doesn't -- as is true in several of the highest-profile cases in the current round of recalls (e.g. Fun Kun-chi, Wang Hung-wei, and Hung Meng-kai) -- then they're probably able to survive if they can turn out their base.

Winning the by-election is no sure thing either. After Chen Po-wei got recalled, the DPP still picked up the seat in a bit of an upset against Yen Kuan-heng. I haven't shown it here, but by-elections have generally had very different turnout and dynamics than general elections, and it's not certain that a recall removal will lead to a change of that seat. So we need to be cautious about how we interpret the results tomorrow if more than 6 KMT legislators go down to defeat -- it's no guarantee the DPP is headed for a majority. 

I'm not going to attempt to forecast what will happen in these recall elections -- this is an unprecedented situation, and I don't have a good feel for three critical variables:

1. Will there be differential turnout among DPP vs KMT partisans?
2. What will TPP voters do? 
3. Will anyone else show up to vote? 

The answers to these three questions will determine how this mass recall election goes. On each question:

Differential Turnout: If the DPP turns out their base en masse, they're probably going to be able to win a couple recalls in the marginal districts (I'm looking at the seats in New Taipei and Taoyuan especially). If there's differential turnout, then maybe a couple KMT legislators in bluer districts go down in surprise defeats, too -- think Taipei 3 or Hsinchu County. 

One very crude way to estimate possible outcomes is to start with the data above, from the Election Study Center at NCCU. They updated their regular partisan trends estimate just last month. The last data point in the figure above shows the DPP outpacing the combined KMT and TPP partisanship: 31.6 to 29.5%.

Now imagine -- again, this is very crude -- that both sides mobilize their bases and in a best-case scenario get all of those partisan identifiers out to the polls to vote for their respective sides: pro-recall for DPP, anti-recall for KMT. 

In that case, the KMT has to worry. There's enough DPP partisans to push the yes vote over the threshold in some of these districts all by themselves. So the KMT has to mobilize to try to win the actual vote, and can't count on low turnout saving them. Also, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence of asymmetric enthusiasm here: DPP supporters have been fired up to vote for a year or more, and it feels existential to some of them. My sense is KMT supporters, less so. 

On TPP Supporters: So that then leaves the TPP voters. If TPP identifiers buy the party's messaging that this is an illegitimate power grab by the DPP and Lai, and also turn out en masse, then that will probably be enough to keep successful recalls below six. But I'm not confident of that at all -- TPP voters (and I suspect some members of the TPP caucus) wouldn't mind seeing a few KMT legislators go down and open up some LY seats as potential targets for the TPP. 

On Non-Partisans: I know the partisans are fired up about this election. But my prior is that those irregular voters who turn out in general elections but not in local or irregular elections -- anywhere from 10-25% of the electorate, judging by previous turnout rates -- are probably going to sit this one out. For the DPP's wildest dreams of a massive wipeout of KMT legislators to come true, they probably need turnout from irregular voters, too -- the cases above where an incumbent survived solely because the yes votes didn't meet the threshold look like a cautionary tale to me.

Bottom Line: I think it's going to be hard for the DPP to flip control of the LY via the recall. Just about everything has to break their way tomorrow, and in the following two months, to pull that off. For intellectual honesty's sake, I think this is the most likely outcome...

More than six but less than 12 KMT legislators get recalled tomorrow. 

More than zero but less than six of those seats then flip to the DPP in by-elections. 

​And...Taiwan is basically back where it's been for the last 18 months, with a (possibly chastened, or possibly unrepentant) KMT + TPP majority in the LY still facing off against a (possibly newly conciliatory, or possibly defiant) DPP executive branch.  

To recap the argument so far: The Taiwan People's Party (TPP) controls the critical voting bloc in the Legislative Yuan, but it has not maximized the leverage that voting bloc gives it. 

1. It has not sought to obtain offices (LY speaker or deputy speaker, or cabinet positions) for its members. 
2. It has not sought concrete policy concessions from either the DPP or KMT in return for its support. 
3. It has not tried to maximize its appeal to the general electorate, and it has behaved like a pan-blue party rather than a centrist one. 

​
This behavior is puzzling! 

What Is the TPP Doing? 
I have argued that the TPP is trying to bring about a partisan realignment within the pan-blue camp, away from the KMT. This is the only goal for which the TPP’s current strategy appears rational. It's an unusual strategy, but one that makes some sense given the political constraints the party faces.

Taiwan’s electoral institutions and party system present a high barrier to third-party growth. There is high party system institutionalization and politics and voting are now quite nationalized. The electoral system is permissive enough to allow small parties to gain a foothold in city councils and in the party list vote for the legislature, but they can never expand beyond small-party status unless they replace one of the Big Two. And no small party has ever succeeded in doing so in 30+ years of democratic elections.
 
So, to try to replace the KMT, the TPP needs to do two contradictory things at the same time.

1. Convince pan-blue voters they are one of them, and in particular, to appeal to older KMT supporters while holding onto their younger base.
2. Undermine the KMT, to change beliefs about the long-term viability of that party and convince their supporters that the TPP, not the KMT, is the future.

Now, if you were leading the TPP, how might you go about this? Toward the first goal, you'd pursue a public strategy of alignment with the KMT, especially on issues that you think make the DPP look bad. And toward the second, you'd quietly block legislation that would strengthen the KMT's grassroots or increase its popularity. 

Evidence for the first part of this strategy is obvious: Huang Kuo-chang is appearing in public regularly with the KMT, the TPP is publicly opposing the recall elections against KMT legislators, and (almost) everything controversial that has made it to a final vote in the LY has passed with joint KMT-TPP support over DPP objections. 

But what about the second? Can we find evidence of divergence of interests between the two party caucuses? This is harder to spot, because the TPP doesn't want KMT supporters to notice that it is trying to undermine the party's prospects. The TPP would rather be characterized as "marching in lockstep" with the KMT in its opposition to the DPP government, and everything else that matters to the KMT. 

But I don't think this is actually true.

To begin to see why this claim might be wrong, we need to talk about survivorship bias. Survivorship bias is the logical error of focusing on outcomes that survived a selection process, while overlooking those that did not. The classic example used to illustrate this form of bias comes from the Allied bombing campaign in World War II. The U.S. military did a systematic study of planes returning from bombing missions to try to understand how to improve aircraft survival while under fire. The study noted that certain areas like the wings and fuselage had more bullet holes than the rest, and recommended reinforcing these areas since they seemed to be getting hit a lot more. But this was a fallacy: a statistician, Abraham Wald, noted that the areas with the most bullet holes were places where the plane could be hit and still survive the mission. It was the other areas -- the ones that did not show much damage in surviving planes -- that were critical to surviving a bombing mission. Planes hit in the cockpit or engine simply didn't make it back, and so were not in the "sample" of planes examined.  

Now, what does the patterns of bomber survival in WWII have to do with the Taiwanese legislature? Well, there is also a selection process that occurs before bills introduced in the legislature come up for a vote. And we haven't paid adequate attention (and I include myself in this "we") to how that process might be skewing what we actually see being debated publicly, and being passed, by the TPP-KMT coalition over DPP objections. We need to consider the possibility that stuff the two pan-blue parties don't agree on never makes it to a vote. And it's possible this is happening a lot. 

​​The inference problem here is that we don't know what bills the TPP quietly blocked, because the vast majority of bills introduced in the LY don't come up for a vote. Moreover, as I noted above, the TPP doesn't generally want people to know when they disagree with the KMT on a bill. (And an important corollary: the KMT also doesn't want people to know that it is not all-powerful in the legislature. So it, too, has an incentive to play down disagreements.) But now that we have about 18 months of legislative actions to observe, there is a growing list of oddities in legislation that has passed, and just as importantly, not passed, during this term, and I think we have enough observations to discern a pattern here: the KMT is not getting blanket support from the TPP. 

For one, here are a few changes the DPP pushed through from 2016-2023 that hit KMT interests directly, and that the KMT screamed bloody murder about at the time, that have not so far been reversed. If the TPP is doing everything the KMT wants, I would expect to see reversals on some of these issues (I'll keep updating here as I come across more): 

• ​Farmer's and Fisherman's and Irrigation Associations changed from elected to appointed leadership.
• Pension reforms, which reduced the preferential benefits enjoyed by martial-law-era civil servants (mostly KMT supporters). 
• Actions by the Ill-Gotten Party Assets Committee to freeze or confiscate KMT party assets.
• [Update 2025.8.4] The Anti-Infiltration Act. Notably, the NPP under Huang Kuo-chang and Ko Wen-je separately supported passage of this act in 2019, while the KMT has been a consistent critic of it.

And here are a few controversial bills that the KMT caucus seemed to be gung-ho about that then quietly died, or ended up looking much different when they finally passed:

• Fu Kun-chi's special infrastructure budget bill. This would have allocated at least US$60bn to build two expressways and high speed rail to Hualien -- Fu Kun-chi's constituency. (to put that in context, Taiwan's annual defense budget is less than US$20 billion.) Speaker Han Kuo-yu and Deputy Speaker Johnny Chiang co-sponsored the two most controversial bills in that package. And then...crickets. Nothing ever came of this proposal. We don't know whether this was due to internal opposition from other members of the KMT or quiet TPP opposition, but it's an interesting data point.   
• Constitutional Court reform. Lots of changes to the court were proposed after the CC ruled against the LY oversight bill, most of them designed to limit the court's authority over the LY or paralyze it completely. But the final legislation ended up at the last moment with a different threshold of nine justices required to rule legislation unconstitutional, rather than a return to the two-thirds requirement before 2022. 
• Central-local government revenue division bill. I'm less confident about this one, but there were some more extreme proposals put forward in the debate about changing the formula for allocation of government revenues between central and local governments. What ended up in the bill was a 60-40 percent allocation, not as extreme as some of what was reported at the time. Here's what the TPP had originally proposed.

Why Didn't the KMT Raise the Recall Threshold?! 
And finally, the real smoking gun -- the bill that clued me in to this whole shadow game between the TPP and KMT -- is the amendment to the Civil Servants Elections and Recall Act that passed in December 2024. Various KMT members floated proposals to raise the recall threshold as early as June 2024, to protect them from the prospect of mass recalls that they are, in fact, now facing down in less than a week. Isn't it strange that the KMT saw this threat coming a year ahead of time, and still failed to protect its own legislators? 

I had long assumed this increase in the recall threshold was inevitable and that the activists preparing to collect recall signatures were wasting their time, because it was not in the KMT's interest to leave their legislators vulnerable to a potent recall movement that was clearly a threat even last summer. They simply couldn't not change this threshold if they had the votes -- it would be political malpractice not to. And in December, when the bill amending the Elections and Recall Act looked like it was headed for passage, the reporting on the proposal implied that the threshold would be raised. I thought so too. 

Except it wasn't! 

Why not? Well, way back in July 2024 Ko Wen-je was asked about this proposal, and he said he didn't support changing the threshold. The KMT tried, probably repeatedly over many months, to get the TPP to vote for this, and...failed. They didn't have the votes. Which is why the KMT is now facing mass recalls that could strip them of their control of the LY as soon as July 28.

This seems like it should be a huge part of the recall elections story, no? The KMT's coalition partner left them exposed to a mass recall. And while the KMT now has to engage in a desperate rear-guard struggle to preserve their seats, the TPP doesn't have to do anything because their legislators are all from the party list tier. (As an aside, if I were one of the KMT legislators facing a recall vote, I'd be pissed right now. The TPP hung them out to dry on this issue.)    

And as for why the TPP might want to block raising the recall threshold, but not call attention to themselves as the reason? I will leave that question as an exercise for the reader...

I've argued that the TPP is trying a different strategy to grow their party: they are trying to become the preeminent pan-blue party and replace the KMT.

Will they succeed? I don’t think so. They're missing a couple elements to pull this strategy off. 

First is talent. Right now the TPP has three names anyone has heard of: Ko Wen-je, Huang Kuo-chang, and Huang Shan-shan. Being generous, we might say Tsai Pi-ru and Kao Hung-an also have some name recognition. Beyond that? It’s a stretch. And Huang Kuo-chang is certainly not doing anything to share the spotlight with up-and-coming younger leaders. 

Second is grassroots supporters. That means more than simply an online army of fans who turn into your livestreams and like your posts on TikTok. What the DPP and KMT still have is grassroots party activists who can be mobilized to come out to rallies, to turn out to vote, and to, yes, collect signatures for recall elections. I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence the TPP has core supporters they can rely on to turn out around the island -- in Taipei, maybe, and perhaps Hsinchu, but elsewhere they are extremely weak at local levels. 

Contrast that with the DPP and, more importantly for present purposes, the KMT. I still remember clearly watching a KMT parade and rally in Taipei in January 2016, shortly before the presidential election that year. This was one of the most difficult periods in the KMT's recent history. It was the end of the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, and President Ma was deeply unpopular. The Sunflower Movement had succeeded in blocking Ma's signature cross-Strait trade agreement, the CSSTA, and the opposition stirred up by that project contributed to the KMT's sweeping defeat in the local elections in late 2014. The party then lurched from one political crisis to another over the next year. They ended up with the deep-blue firebrand Hung Hsiu-chu as their presidential candidate when everyone else declined to run, and then had to execute a late switch of candidate from Hung to party chairman Eric Chu in fall of 2015. The party's old nemesis James Soong then declared he would run (again!) as an independent candidate to give pan-blue voters a protest vote option. And at that point, everyone knew that Eric Chu was toast.  
 
And yet, on January 8, 2016, tens of thousands of KMT supporters nevertheless showed up in Taipei from all over Taiwan for an old-fashioned political parade down Roosevelt Road to Ketagalan Boulevard, to support a hopeless campaign heading for a crushing electoral defeat. Here’s a few pictures of that.

If the TPP is going to replace the KMT, it will have to convince even these diehard loyalists that the KMT’s future is hopeless. And it will need to build chapters of activists of its own.

I have always doubted Ko Wen-je is the right person for this kind of party-building work. Ko often has analogized party-building to running a business: cold, calculating, rational, and vote (profit?)-driven. That may be true for winning over swing voters. But if the only reason voters have to support you is that you're more "rational" than the next guy, what happens when they no longer believe that? What if there's another guy who comes along who offers better answers to their problems? The fans you've acquired, if they like you only because you "do the right thing," are going to abandon you when they no longer believe you have their best interests at heart. Success is easy come, easy go in this model.

There is, however, a different model of party-building in Taiwan, one that the DPP followed in its early days, which is based on identity appeals. "Our party stands for you. Our people are like you. We have suffered the same things you have. We speak the same language you have. You can trust us." Those appeals may turn some voters off...But for the DPP they also built a loyal following that has stuck with them through bad times as well as good. I just don't see the TPP doing the hard work of building those grassroots connections that can outlast any particular leader, either under Ko Wen-je or now, under Huang Kuo-chang.

Does the TPP Have a Future?: What To Look For
Putting this series of posts together has also clarified for me that the 2026 local elections are really critical for the TPP's future. Given Ko’s detention, Kao Hung-an’s suspension, and the party’s slump in the polls over the last year, they desperately need to demonstrate that they still have room to grow their electoral support. They need to develop a deeper bench of local talent – candidates who can win votes independently of the TPP’s brand and have crossover appeal. They need to run their own candidates – and win! – in some of the local mayor’s races. And they need to expand the number of seats they hold in the local councils (they won 14 last time – significant for a third party in Taiwan, but also only 1.5% of all seats.)

But the most fundamental question for the TPP in 2026 is whether to coordinate future nominations with the KMT. In 2023, Ko Wen-je rather naively assumed he could come to some kind of agreement with Eric Chu and Hou You-yi that would give him a clear path to the top of a joint presidential ticket. The spectacular way in which that agreement fell apart is a cautionary tale for the TPP. But for the party to have a chance of winning any of these offices in 2026, they still need to get the KMT to yield some nominations to TPP candidates. So the party is caught on the horns of a dilemma: cooperate and get absorbed, or don’t cooperate and throw elections to the DPP, or worse -- watch the KMT win these elections anyway and demonstrate the TPP is irrelevant. I’m not sure how they will resolve this dilemma. I’m more confident in predicting that the KMT will drive a hard bargain in any nomination negotiations, despite the TPP-KMT track record of cooperation in the LY right now, than I am in predicting the TPP's strategy in 2026.

So to wrap up, I’ll stick my neck out here and say flat out that I don’t think the TPP is going to succeed in initiating a partisan realignment away from the KMT, however they choose to approach 2026 (and 2028, for that matter). The party is much more likely to decline or collapse after the next election than to surge into second place and usher in a lasting change to Taiwan’s party system.

​But it is going to be fascinating to watch them try.