My
If Ko thought he could win, he’d run this year. His strategy is clear, and it follows a simple observation below.
Before Ma’s second term, KMT’s main election draw was that they are the party of “the status quo”. If you are anxious about any political change hurting your profit margin, you vote KMT.
However, as China reverted back to being even more authoritarian, not hurting your profit margin became sucking up to China, and changing the status quo. That’s why for the last couple of elections KMT’s candidates have been more red than blue. The problem is that most KMT supporters, sans fundamentalists who make up the majority of primary voters, still want to maintain the status quo.
In the mean time, DPP governments under US pressure and China’s threat of military action couldn’t change the status quo anyway. So the DPP instead became the party of the status quo.
That leaves a whole “status quo” segment of former KMT supporters marginalized. They don’t want to vote for the DPP, but they also know the current KMT is all about changing the status quo.
Ko calls himself a pragmatist, but he is really an opportunist at heart. He sees this trend and knows there’s a huge swath of voters waiting to find a status quo candidate they can support. I believe Ko changed his tune since 2016 because he has been playing to win them over. Before, Ko played the “I’m for independence” card to win over DPP and NPP youth votes. Now, since his pivot, he can careless if they stay with him. Plenty still do anyway. The key for him is to remain fairly ambiguous about independence and China when asked about it, but actively lean slightly towards China to win over KMT supporters.
If Ko deserves more credits than I give him, meaning that he is playing a larger strategic game, and he is doing this to marginalize the KMT, instead of for power and his self interests, I think he is still doing it wrong.
By opening up his party to anyone who wants to join, without outlining a core principle of the party, he has filled his ranks with plenty of China leaning players from the camps of Want Want media, Terry Gou and James Soong, leaving many of them in key positions. If that’s where the money is coming from, he will eventually be marginalized within his own party if he ever wishes to deviate from their goals.
For those who can read Chinese, this is a list of reactions towards DPP passing the budget to purchase new F-16Vs.
Ko called it Taiwan paying the US for protection fees, and that you shouldn’t have to pay for the drill bit to do other’s dirty work.