07.18.05

A sign of things to come for the KMT?

Posted in News at 2:14 pm by David

The KMT is not a normal political party. Normally, if a candidate wins 72% of the vote in an election, then everyone rushes to congratulate him, and ingratiate themselves with him. Not so in the KMT where it seems that new KMT chairman Ma Jing-yeou is trying to ingratiate himself with the loser while getting snubbed from all directions. First, outgoing chairman Lien Chan (who, in a classy move, ‘accidentally’ let the TV cameras see that he’d voted for Wang) decided to publically admonish Ma about the pre-election complaints on vote-buying:

“The inflammatory language has to stop,” Lien was quoted as saying in yesterday’s United Evening News. “It is most important to heal the wounds and ..unite.”

Aside from the fact that Lien clearly doesn’t care whether vote-buying happened or not (but cares that it was made public), his decision to slap-down the winner at the moment you’d expect congratulations is pretty divisive in itself.

The there is Ma’s relationship with the loser: Wang Jin-pyng. After Wang phoned Ma to concede defeat, Ma went round to Wang’s headquarters to have a personal word …

After winning the election, Ma was seen on television Saturday night rushing to Wang’s car as it was departing, apparently trying to say something. But Wang, who would have seen Ma, refused to wind down the window and the car drove off swiftly, raising eyebrows in the local media.

Undeterred by this snub, Ma has said he is still keen to talk to Wang in the next few days to clear the air and discuss future cooperation. However, it seems that Wang has already turned down the offer of vice-chair of the KMT, and his aides are making their views on Ma clear:

“Ma’s camp’s accusations of so-called corruption, bribery, inflated KMT membership numbers and that Wang was following the so-called ‘Lee Teng-hui line’” are just too much to take.”

The aide was referring to former President Lee Teng-hui, who became a radical Taiwan independence activist once he quit the party.

“If Ma wanted to cooperate with Wang after the election, he shouldn’t have made all the nasty comments beforehand, ruining the party’s image,” another Wang aide said.

“If Ma says Wang represents ‘black gold’, then why does he want to cooperate with him?”

Finally, there is the issue of cooperation with the KMT’s main ally, the PFP. PFP chairman James Soong promised not to get involved in the KMT election - only to appear on videotape at Wang’s final pre-election rally, and it seems he’s none too enthusiastic about working with Ma:

Still, Wang was the preferred candidate of the PFP’s, with Wang’s aides saying Soong likened the behavior of Ma’s campaign aides to China’s red guards during the Cultural Revolution.

In fact, just about the only words of comfort for Ma after his victory came from two of the most unlikely directions: President Chen Shui-bian and that other President Hu Jintao.

It’s looking like Ma’s new job is going to be hard work; he’s probably relieved to be back at his dayjob today monitoring how his city is handling typhoon Haitang.

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