Critics and allies alike enjoy marking President Chen's scorecard, now that he has been in office for over a year. But before an administration can achieve anything, it must learn how to function. The country has come to realize that forming a minority government is easy, but making it work may well be impossible.
They say democracy is a lifelong learning process. In Taiwan, political terminology has become a required course in the current curriculum. Terms like presidential system, minority government, parliamentary system, semi-presidential system, coalition government, and dual-leader system were mysteries to most people before the country's 2000 presidential election. Since then, however, the president, the premier, and legislators have banded together to form the faculty, the average person in the street has reluctantly signed on for classes, and tuition comes in the shape of political stalemate.
These difficulties were foreshadowed in December 1996, when the Office of the President convened a National Devel opment Conference at which political and civic leaders were invited to assess the most pressing issues facing the government in the realms of cross-strait relations, economic development, and constitutional reform. As regards the latter, conference delegates were in broad agreement that the relationship between the president and the other key organs of state--the Execu tive Yuan, or Cabinet, and the Legislative Yuan, or legislature--needed to be more clearly defined. In the following July, the National Assembly translated this cross-party consensus into some Additional Articles of the ROC Constitution.
The Constitution as amended strengthened the powers of the popularly elected president by enabling him to appoint the premier, or chairperson of the Cabinet, without legislative consent. Adjustments were also made to the balance between the executive and legislative arms. For example, under the original provisions, the Cabinet might send certain kinds of bills back to the legislature with a certificate to the effect that they would be difficult to execute and a request for reconsideration, but the original provision would prevail as long as two-thirds of legislators voted to uphold it. After the Constitution was amended, however, the two-thirds figure became one-half, thus enabling a bare majority to override the objections of the executive branch.
These amendments provoked much discussion in academic fields. Some scholars argued that the new system should properly be known as a dual-headed presidential system, because the president could appoint the premier without the consent of the legislature. Others said that it was really a dual-headed parliamentary system, since the Cabinet, as the highest execu tive organ, answered to the legislature, not the president. Yet others believed it was a dual-headed system where power rotated according to whether the president's political party controlled a majority of legislative seats or not.
"In medicine, if experts discuss a certain topic at different seminars they usually reach the same conclusions, because there can only be one scientific truth--otherwise the patients are in trouble," says Shen Fu-hsiung, a physician-turned-DPP legislator and director of the party's Policy Research and Coordinating Committee. "But in politics you have ten discussions and get eleven different conclusions, because everyone interprets the facts from whatever angle benefits himself or his party the most."
Whatever the real nature of the beast, these somewhat esoteric arguments did not generate much heat with the general public, since the government was functioning exactly as before and on the surface nothing had changed. In Shen's view, as long as the president of the country was also the chairperson of the party that held the majority of legislative seats, that was always going to be true. Real power was exercised through a combination of the Office of the President, playing its constitu tional role, and party networking in smoke-filled back rooms.
This pattern was broken when Chen Shui-bian became the ROC's first minority president, winning just 39 percent of the votes cast. He inherited a legislature where the DPP held only 67 of the 225 seats, and was thus the first ROC president not to enjoy control of the Legislative Yuan.
What consequences followed? James Yang, chairman of National Chengchi University's Department of Po litical Science, says that in this situation the president had a choice. He could work with the opposition parties to form a coalition government shored up by nearly half the total number of legislators. Alternatively, he could appoint the chairman of the party holding a majority of legislative seats as premier, thus in effect creating a one-party majority government. Since the KMT held 113 seats, that honor would presumably have gone to party chairman Lien Chan. Yang sees an analogy with France's Fifth Republic, where the Socialists lost control of the National Assembly in 1986. François Mitterrand retained the presidency but had to work with the right-wing government of incoming premier Jacques Chirac. "Majority rule is the true foundation of democracy," he notes.
In Taiwan's case it did not work out that way, however. President Chen appointed KMT stalwart Tang Fei premier and recruited several other KMT members to his Cabinet. In his inauguration speech he referred to this as "a government for all the people." "In forming a new government, we recruit according to talent and do not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, gender, or party affiliation," he went on. "The welfare of the people shall be our primary goal."
Despite the echo of Abraham Lincoln, "government for all the people" was a new term not only to the Taiwanese populace but also to political scientists. They wanted to know how to interpret the phrase, how checks and balances worked under such a system, and whether it could be made to fit within the rules of party politics. Unfortunately, however, the "government for all the people" quickly collapsed. Tang Fei resigned after less than five months in office, pleading ill health. Most observers believed, however, that he quit because he opposed the president's decision to cancel construction of Taiwan's fourth nuclear power plant.
President Chen next appointed Chang Chun-hsiung, his long-time ally in the DPP, as premier in charge of a Cabinet that did not enjoy majority legislative support. "It is the president's constitutional right to appoint the premier without legislative consent, so forming a minority government like that is very easy," James Yang says. "The question then becomes: If the Constitution requires the executive branch to be responsible to the legislative branch, does an administration--all-the-people government, minority government, whatever you call it--have any chance of getting its policies through?"
According to Yang, the only chance is via negotiation. Before submitting a bill or budget to the legislature, the Cabinet must explain to the opposition legislative majority why they should support it. If the legislators disagree, the Cabinet should then compromise and make adjustments in the light of the majority's objections. "But up to now, I haven't seen the DPP administration doing any such thing," Yang says. "It makes decisions according to DPP ideology, behind closed doors, and expects to win the support of the legislature."
The fourth nuclear power plant is a good example of this process. A few weeks after assuming office, Premier Chang Chun-hsiung surprised the country by suddenly announcing the termination of the fourth nuclear power plant, which was one-third complete at the time. To express its disapproval, the legislature pigeonholed all bills sent to it for approval by the Cabinet and proclaimed Chang persona non grata, actually going so far as to ban him from entering the parliament building to discharge his constitutional duty of presenting an annual report. "You can't ask the party that controls the majority of legislative seats to forget about the opinions and interests they represent and go along with whatever a minority government wants," says Ting Shou-chung, a KMT legislator and the deputy executive director of the party's Policy Coordination Committee. "It's against the basic principles of party politics and the ROC Constitution."
The decision to halt work on the power plant was reversed after a ruling by the Council of Grand Justices, a court charged with deciding points of constitutional law, that it was procedurally flawed. The only positive thing to come out of the incident was that it aroused nationwide interest in the way a minority government functioned, or failed to function.
This was an alarming setback for the DPP. Even some of the party's elected legislators were pessimistic about the future of the minority government. The DPP's Shen Fu-hsiung points out that President Chen and many party members were misled from the beginning by academics who insisted that the government was and could function as a dual-leader presiden tial system, where the president's powers overrode those of parliament. "They tried to make things go with a presidential swing," Shen says. "They forgot that major policies are still decided by counting hands in the legislature, where the DPP has only 29 percent of the hands."
Shen nevertheless believes that the KMT is just as much at fault as the DPP, because it irrationally boycotts all bills sent down by the Cabinet instead of bringing the dispute out into the open by means of a vote of no confidence. Although the president does not need legislative consent to appoint the premier, the legislature can propose a motion of no confidence in the person appointed. If more than half of the total number of legislators approve the motion, the premier must tender his resignation, but at the same time he may ask the president to dissolve the Legislative Yuan as a prelude to new elections.
But the KMT signally failed to adopt this course. The clear implication is that it tacitly approved the president's appoint ment. "If I ask you to marry me, you can shout out yes, or you can simply pack your things and move in with me without saying a word--they mean the same," Shen says. "You've got the right to accept me or reject me, but if you agree to marry me, tacitly or otherwise, the one thing you can't do is move into my home and turn the place upside down."
It is easy to figure out why the KMT did not propose a vote of no confidence. After the party's failure in the presidential election, where its candidate Lien Chan secured only 23 percent of the votes cast, it realized that it was unlikely to hold on to its majority if new elections were called. But although its members have been accused of boycotting bills irrationally, the KMT naturally seeks to put a different spin on things. "A system of checks and balances is a basic principle of democracy," Ting Shou-chung says. "The administration should face the problem and deal with it, instead of blaming the opposition parties."
In fact, neither the president nor the KMT has done anything unconstitutional. They are simply trying to bend the gray areas of the Constitution to their own ends. As long as the president forms a minority government, he does not need to share any of his administrative powers with the opposition. As long as the KMT holds off on a vote of no confidence, it can command a majority in the legislature until the end of this year, when elections are due anyway.
But this shadow boxing bodes no good for society as a whole. Policies framed by the executive branch cannot be approved; instead, opposition lawmakers prepare their own versions of laws and send them to the executive branch to be implemented. A notorious case occurred late last year, when the legislature rejected a Cabinet proposal to cut the standard number of working hours from forty-eight to forty-four per week, replacing it with a scheme reducing the workweek to eighty-four hours every two weeks. Although the premier warned that this could have a serious impact on productivity, the Cabinet had no choice but to implement the revised law. To many observers, this seemed to downgrade the Cabinet to a kind of executive bureau functioning under the authority of the legislature.
Most of the hopes of ending this deadlock repose in the formation of a genuine coalition government after the legislative elections due in December. President Chen, in his televised speech on the first anniversary of his inauguration, acknowledged that people are sick and tired of the seemingly endless confrontations between the government and the opposition. In the event that no party wins an outright legislative majority come December, he envisaged the possibility of a coalition as a means of rebuilding the tattered legislature and reestablishing Taiwan's political stability.
Academics, politicians, and experienced analysts are agreed that no individual party will win more than half of the legislative seats in the upcoming election, and that the only way out is the formation of a coalition dependent for its day-to-day workings on interparty negotiations. But there the agreement ends. The opposition parties and some members of the DPP think that whoever can put together a majority alliance in the legislature should have the right to form the Cabinet. President Chen, however, has let it be known that although the DPP will go along with the idea of a coalition, as he promised in his speech, it will have to be DPP-dominated.
But as James Yang points out, it is vital for parties who intend to work together to have similar ideologies. It is therefore much more likely that the KMT, the People First Party, and the New Party will end up forming a coalition government, since none of these three main opposition parties can accept the DPP's Taiwan independence platform.
Candidates elected to the Fifth Legislative Yuan will take their seats in February 2002. How the coalition government is formed at that time will depend a lot on the actual numbers, and President Chen's continuing willingness to release a measure of power to a majority alliance that may be hostile to his ideals. Between now and then, is there any way the administration and the legislature can work together and make a go of at least some policies? "Impossible" comes the answer from the deputy executive director of the majority opposition party's Policy Coordination Committee. "Unlikely" is how the director of the DPP's Policy Research and Coordinating Committee sees it. To the public at large, it very much looks as if the ROC's first-ever peaceful transfer of power has become so "peaceful" that it can no longer breathe--at least not until after the upcoming elections.