Pro-China party win dents Tsai authority

Bloomberg

Taiwan’s pro-independence leader, Tsai Ing-wen, has just over a year to win back public support if she wants to avoid going down in history as the island’s first one-term president.
Her Democratic Progressive Party suffered a resounding loss to the China-friendly Kuomintang in local elections. The scale of the defeat was far greater than forecast, with the DPP losing seven cities and counties of the 13 they held — including its traditional bastions of Kaohsiung and Yilan.
Now with just 14 months to go until the presidential election in January 2020, Tsai faces a challenge to turn things around. Although she resigned as head of the DPP after the election loss, Tsai faces no obvious challengers from within who might stop her from seeking a second term as president.
“This result demands a response from Tsai, and the obvious change would be to emphasize the DPP’s strengths and the things that got Tsai in,” said Jonathan Sullivan, director of Nottingham University’s China Policy Institute.
“Tsai has made a liberal, progressive society a big part of her appeals to the rest of the world to support Taiwan in juxtaposition to an increasingly repressive China.”
Saturday’s election saw a “Blue Wave” sweep Taiwan in a resurgence of the KMT after Tsai comprehensively ousted the party from power in 2016. The size of the swing was evident in the popular vote:
On Saturday, KMT candidates won 48.8 percent of the overall vote, compared to 39.2 percent for the DPP.
In 2016, Tsai had trounced her KMT challenger by 25 percentage points. The KMT promotes better ties with China. A return to power for the party would be seen as a welcome development by the Chinese authorities, which have frozen all direct contact with Tsai after she declined to accept Beijing’s claim that Taiwan belongs to “one China.”
In an opinion piece on Monday, the Chinese government-run China Daily placed the blame for the DPP’s defeat on Tsai’s policy towards the mainland.