Pressure is building for Taiwan’s president to step down as chief of the island’s China-friendly ruling party after an unprecedented election battering by the opposition threw into doubt efforts to build closer ties with the giant neighbor.
With presidential elections due within two years, President Ma Ying-jeou is unlikely to be able to push forward stalled trade talks with China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province to be taken back by force, if necessary.
Giving up the party chairman’s role as a gesture to take responsibility for the election losses, as some within the party are demanding, does not require Ma to relinquish the presidency, however. Ma is serving his second, and final, four-year term as president, which ends in 2016.
The beating Ma’s Kuomintang (KMT) party took at Saturday’s local elections shows that its strategy built with Beijing, to pull the island closer using economic ties, is failing, said Nicholas Consonery, of political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.
“It is quite negative for Taiwan-China relations,” said Consonery, a director of the US-based body, referring to the election result, which prompted the resignation of the premier.
Within hours of the poll results, barbed wire was hastily run atop the metal gates protecting the Kuomintang’s headquarters in the capital, Taipei, as a smattering of protesters gathered outside, shouting “Ma, step down!”
Inside, Ma bowed deeply before cameras and apologized for the loss. The protest petered out quickly, but the negative sentiment has been growing for some time.
In March, thousands of young Taiwanese occupied parliament in a demonstration, dubbed the Sunflower movement, against a planned trade pact calling for closer ties with Beijing.
China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner, and has preferred to deal with the party of Chiang Kai-shek that retreated to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war in 1949.
The alternative is the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which advocates independence for Taiwan.