The 113 deputies elected to Taiwan’s Parliament, the Legislative Yuan, on January 13, took office on Thursday 1er February, while the future president of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Lai Ching-te, will not be inducted until May. Neither of the two major Taiwanese parties having an absolute majority, it is with the support of the two independent deputies and the abstention of the eight deputies of the Taiwan People’s Party (PPT) that Han Kuo-yu and Johnny Chiang, the candidates of the Kouomintang, were respectively elected president and vice-president.
In this new Parliament, the Kouomintang, the former Chinese nationalist party, occupies 52 seats (compared to 38 in the previous legislature) and the DPP, in power since 2016 and re-elected in January for a third presidential term, only occupies 51 (compared to 68 in 2016 and 61 in 2020).
During his inauguration speech, Han Kuo-yu pledged to respect the principle of neutrality to which his role assigns him. “ Taiwanese people want a Legislative Yuan that takes governance seriously, is cooperative and united, and is dedicated to Taiwan’s well-being. (…) I would like to remind the 113 legislators that the world is watching Taiwan’s democracy”said the man who had, in 1993, beaten him to the point of sending him to the hospital, the former president of the republic, Chen Shui-bian (DPP), when both men were young deputies.
Taiwan’s Parliament is one of the most undisciplined on the planet. You can sometimes see mobile phones, microphones, shoes or lunch boxes flying under the portrait of Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Republic of China (official name of Taiwan), before the deputies come to blows.
Symbolic advantage
For Han Kuo-yu, 66, a rather boorish but cunning and charismatic character among older crowds, the big loser in the 2020 presidential election, this appointment is an unexpected return to the heart of political life. “He is easy to contact. Some say he drinks a lot, but that’s just to make people comfortable and make friends. He’s a hard worker,” ensures World Yeh Kuang-Shih, who was his deputy mayor of Kaohsiung. His 2020 defeat for the presidency was coupled with another political slap when the inhabitants of the large southern city, Kaohsiung, managed to expel him from town hall, after an extremely rare procedure. Two years earlier, his unexpected conquest of this city, considered an impregnable DPP stronghold for the KMT, had shown his pugnacity and ambition.
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