Although presidential and legislative elections in Taiwan were only last year, the current political mood feels like a campaign year. That’s because an unprecedented wave of recall campaigns has broken out against the Kuomintang (KMT) leading to dueling campaign rallies between both sides.
In 2024, the KMT’s efforts to expand legislative powers stoked public anger. The party narrowly controls the legislature, but has failed to capture the presidency since 2012. The law passed last year would have allowed for legislators to summon citizens, government workers, corporate executives, military officials, and others for questioning, with fines imposed on those who declined to comply or who answered untruthfully. The context is important: KMT legislator Ma Wen-chun had shortly before been accused of leaking details of Taiwan’s domestic submarine program to the Chinese government. This led to concerns that these powers would be used to force members of the military to reveal confidential details of Taiwan’s defense program. Anger against the KMT’s actions sparked what later came to be known as the Bluebird Movement, the largest protest movement in Taiwan since the 2014 Sunflower Movement.
When these expanded powers were struck down by the Constitutional Court, the KMT next moved to freeze the court itself. This was accomplished by mandating a minimum number of justices for constitutional interpretations, then blocking all of the Lai administration’s appointments to the Constitutional Court – thus preventing the court from ever reaching that minimum threshold.
But the recall campaigns really gained steam after the KMT’s efforts to block and then cut the national budget. Earlier this year, the KMT froze or cut 34 percent of the government’s operational expenses – the largest set of budget cuts in Taiwanese history.
At a time when the United States has called for Taiwan to increase its military spending, the budget would cut defense programs pertaining to asymmetric defense, such as drone development, flagship programs as the domestic submarine program, and the publicity budget for recruiting new soldiers at a time of flagging enrollment numbers. Yet even while demanding a reduction of the defense budget, the KMT still calls for an increase in salaries for professional soldiers, traditionally a demographic that has supported the KMT.
With the possibility of significant economic impact on Taiwan due to tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, the KMT proposed using a budget for economic subsidies that it had previously frozen. Even so, the party continues to call for a freeze on subsidies for Taiwan’s state-run power utility, Taipower, that were previously used to keep electricity prices artificially low.
The resulting series of recall campaigns against the KMT has been unprecedented: there has never been as widespread a series of recall campaigns targeting all legislators of a specific political camp. The KMT blasted the effort as “revenge recalls” orchestrated by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) against the KMT, in line with previous election cycles in which pan-Green and pan-Blue politicians sought to recall each other.
However, what has come to be known as the “Great Recall” has evidenced unusual dynamics. Almost all of the recalls against DPP legislators have run aground, while 36 recall campaigns against KMT legislators have met the benchmarks required for recall votes to take place. This means that recall elections will put the KMT entirely on the defensive, rather than pitting both sides against each other on equal grounds.
To begin with, there were never as many recall campaigns against DPP legislators as there were against KMT legislators. Then the KMT’s petition drives against DPP legislators seemed unable to collect sufficient signatures. In some cases, the recall organizers instead began fraudulently copying KMT party rolls and even the household registration database in order to meet the number of signatures. In taking such illegal shortcuts, KMT party chapter heads have run afoul of the law, with chapter heads in northern, central, and southern Taiwan called in for questioning.
At times, this has resulted in bizarre moments of political spectacle. For example, the recall campaign against DPP Secretary General Rosalia Wu failed to submit any signatures because the convenor of the campaign withdrew after he discovered that the signature of his deceased mother had been copied – twice – in the course of signature collection. The mother of the convenor of the recall campaign against former Sunflower Movement activist and DPP legislator Wu Pei-yi publicly denounced the KMT for putting her son up to collecting fraudulent signatures. A full 96 percent of signatures calling for Wu Pei-yi’s recall were found to be fraudulent, while 94 percent of signatures in the Rosalia Wu recall campaign were fake.
Perhaps the most shocking episode, though, came when Sung Chien-liang, the convenor of a recall campaign against Lee Kun-cheng of the DPP, was called in for questioning over fraudulent signatures. Sung appeared in court wearing a Nazi uniform and carrying a copy of Mein Kampf, and was photographed performing a Nazi salute. This seems to have been a tone-deaf attempt to frame the investigation of recall fraud as DPP-orchestrated persecution of political enemies. Sung’s actions – and KMT chair Eric Chu’s refusal to apologize for them – led to criticisms of Chu and the KMT from the German and Israeli representative offices in Taiwan.
Indeed, Chu has come under fire for the KMT’s repeated stumbles in the recall campaigns. Chu is now expected to be challenged by Taichung mayor Lu Shiow-yen in the upcoming KMT chair election. Nevertheless, Chu and the KMT as a whole have doubled down on the rhetoric of the DPP enacting “Green Communism” in Taiwan, illustrating the deep partisanship at present.
On the other hand, it is still not very clear why the KMT is encountering such issues in signature collection. While the KMT has traditionally performed more strongly at the grassroots mobilization level of Taiwanese politics, the party appears to have become unusually weak at the local level.
To make up for the shortfall, the KMT has called for a number of national referendums, hoping to replicate its successful use of referendums in the 2018 elections. The issues have varied widely: a referendum in favor of restarting the shuttered Ma’anshan nuclear reactor, which recently reached the end of its 40-year lifespan, one in favor of capital punishment, and one against what the KMT has termed the DPP-instituted “martial law.” The Central Election Commission later ruled against the referendum on capital punishment, for the simple reason that the death penalty remains on the books in Taiwan, even if a ruling by the Constitutional Court last year narrowed its scope. The Central Election Commission will allow the Ma’anshan referendum.
In light of the party’s struggles in the recall campaign, it’s interesting to note that the KMT sought to pass these referendum proposals through the legislature rather than by collecting signatures from the public.
In May, the KMT also called for the recall of President Lai Ching-te. This seems to be mostly theatrics, in that there are no provisions for a presidential recall in Taiwan through a general vote. Though it is possible to impeach a president, even with its current slim majority in the legislature in alliance with the Taiwan People’s Party, the KMT does not have the numbers needed for an impeachment vote.
Polling shows that the public is divided on the recalls. The political outlook is also unclear. The DPP would need to flip at least six seats to change the balance of the Legislative Yuan. Even if six KMT legislators are successfully stripped of office in a recall vote, the DPP would still need to win all six by-elections – likely in traditional KMT territory – to fill those seats in the legislature.
With recall votes expected in July and August, much remains up in the air for Taiwanese politics. For now, with its own recall campaigns against the DPP running aground, the KMT is on the defensive.