Taipei, Taiwan – William Lai Ching-te will be sworn in on Monday as Taiwan’s sixth democratically elected president, a role in which he is expected to continue to guide Taiwan in the same direction set by his predecessor, Tsai Ing-Wen.
Lai’s victory at the polls in January marked a narrow but unprecedented victory for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Since Taiwan transitioned to democracy in 1996, the DPP and its more Beijing-friendly rival, the Kuomintang (KMT), have exchanged power every eight years, but Lai’s victory broke that tradition as the DPP won a third term.
Tsai’s vice president, Lai, will have big shoes to fill.
During her eight years in office, Tsai has dramatically raised Taiwan’s profile abroad while treading a fine line around its disputed political status so as not to upset China or the United States.
Tsai’s tenure coincided with a new wave of Taiwanese nationalism, as well as a view of Taiwan as distinct from China despite its deep historical and cultural ties. She has also overseen major changes on the island, including the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019 and the introduction of same-sex adoption in 2022.
Lai is expected to continue steering East Asian democracy in largely the same direction, a point he insisted on during the campaign.
“William Lai has spent the last two and a half years trying to convince the world that he will be a Tsai Ing-Wen 2.0 figure,” said Lev Nachman, a political scientist at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University.
“There is reason to believe in him, although there is a lot of skepticism about what he actually feels, there are enough structural constraints that will prevent him from being able to do anything drastic,” he said.
Lai’s cabinet, appointed in April, includes several former members of the Tsai administration, while his charismatic vice president, Hsiao Bi-khim, 52, was once Taiwan’s top US official and is also aligned with the former -president.
Domestically, Lai is expected to be constrained by a suspended parliament after the DPP lost its slim parliamentary majority to the KMT. Abroad, he faces the challenge of US presidential elections in November, the outcome of which will dictate regional stability more than anything Lai can do as president, according to Nachman.
The US is the main guarantor of Taiwan’s security, but it does not want to see a proxy war break out across the Taiwan Strait between itself, Taiwan and China. Neither does Taiwan, where most people support maintaining the island’s continued “status quo.”
The term is deliberately vague, but it encompasses the view that Taiwan is already de facto independent despite its lack of formal diplomatic recognition. The island, officially known as the Republic of China, is only recognized by a few countries, mainly in the Pacific and the Caribbean.
Taiwan is claimed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has long threatened to bring it in by force if necessary. Every day, Taiwanese reject this goal, but most do not want to make a formal declaration of independence because they fear it will lead to a certain war with Beijing.
‘Worker for independence’ or ‘troublemaker’
As innocuous as the term may seem, supporting the “status quo” marks a major ideological shift for Lai, who once described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence.”
Originally trained as a doctor, Lai was forced to enter politics in 1996 following the Third Strait crisis, according to his official biography. The incident led China to conduct missile tests in the Taiwan Strait for several months in 1995 and 1996, as Taiwan prepared for its first direct presidential elections.
He later served as a lawmaker, mayor, and prime minister of Taiwan, before making an unsuccessful bid to challenge Tsai as the DPP’s presidential candidate before his re-election in 2020. Instead, he became vice president after Tsai won a second term in the presidential office with a landslide victory.
“If we think about Lai now compared to the past, we simply could not imagine that he is the same person,” said Sanho Chung, a political science doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona whose work includes Taiwan. “If you look at Lai as a mayor or a legislator, he was kind of radical.”
Both Chung and Nachman said they expected a relatively muted response from Beijing ahead of Inauguration Day, despite an outbreak earlier this month around Taiwan’s remote Kinmen island when more than a dozen Chinese ships entered the restricted waters of Taiwan. island to carry out “sea exercises”. ” on May 9.
Beijing has continued to send military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, a land and sea area monitored by the military, but the numbers are consistent with past activity, according to defense analyst Ben Lewis, who tracks Beijing’s activity.
His predictions contrast with Beijing’s belligerent response to a visit by then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August 2022, when she organized several days of military exercises in the Taiwan Strait.
Beijing repeated the move a year later, when Tsai met Kevin McCarthy, another former House speaker, during an unofficial stopover in California on her way home from meetings with allies in Central America.
NCCU’s Nachman said China may keep a low profile as it appears to be trying to semi-normalize relations with the KMT.
Beijing does not recognize Taiwan’s government and has cut off official communication since the DPP’s victory in 2016, but has maintained unofficial contacts with the KMT for the past eight years.
The KMT and CCP have a relationship dating back to the 1920s and fought against each other during different phases of the Chinese Civil War, culminating in the KMT’s withdrawal to Taiwan in the late 1940s.
Since the 1990s, however, the relationship between the two parties has warmed.
Former KMT President Ma Ying-jeou has made two trips to mainland China in the past two years, becoming the first Taiwanese leader to visit since the end of the Chinese Civil War.
KMT members have also made private visits to China in recent years, including this year and last.
In contrast, Beijing still considers DPP members to be dangerous “separatists.”
Not least, the man who will lead the island for the next four years. For China, Lai is not only a “separatist” but also a “troublemaker.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
