Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te promised to stand up to China and defend democracy when he took office in 2024. A year on, domestic political turmoil has engulfed the island, stymieing his agenda as it faces Chinese military pressure.
Self-ruled Taiwan is known for its rough and tumble politics, but analysts say the current dysfunction is distracting lawmakers and eroding public confidence — to the benefit of Beijing.
China claims Taiwan is part of its territory and has threatened to use force to bring it under its control.
“The only beneficiary of a divided, fractured Taiwan that is incapable of addressing its own long-term requirements and vulnerabilities is China,” said Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution.
Lai, a staunch defender of Taiwan’s sovereignty and detested by Beijing, was elected in January 2024 with 40 percent of the vote, but his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lost its majority in parliament.
The main opposition Kuomintang party (KMT), which has friendly ties with China, has teamed up with the Taiwan People’s Party to challenge the government’s policies, including slashing the general budget.
Tensions have escalated into physical fights inside parliament and thousands of supporters of the DPP and opposition parties holding rival street protests.
The KMT has called Lai a “dictator” and accused him of pushing Taiwan closer to war with China, while the DPP suggests the KMT is a tool of Beijing and is undermining Taiwan’s security.
The political atmosphere is “poisonous”, said Bonnie Glaser, a Taiwan-China affairs expert at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
The parties “spend a lot of their time thinking about how to weaken support and damage the reputation and the image of their political adversaries”, Glaser said.
“There’s no bipartisanship or ability to come together on issues,” such as low wages and power shortages.
Falling approval
Lai, who marks his first year in office on Tuesday, has seen his approval rating fall to 45.9 percent from 58 percent nearly a year ago, according to a survey by Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation in April.
His disapproval rating rose to 45.7 percent — the highest since he took office — which the polling group linked to the Lai government’s handling of US tariffs on Taiwan and the DPP’s unprecedented recall campaign targeting the opposition.
DPP supporters are seeking to unseat around 30 KMT lawmakers through a legal process that allows legislators to be removed before the end of their term.
While the threshold for a successful recall is high, the DPP only needs to win six seats to wrest back control of parliament.
A rival campaign to unseat 15 DPP members has been embroiled in controversy after KMT staffers were accused of forging the signatures of dead people.
The KMT has also threatened to recall Lai.
“It feels like it’s a negative sum game where all sides are going to come out looking a bit tarnished. The Taiwan political system is going to look a bit more frayed,” said Hass.
Despite the turmoil, Lai has chalked up some domestic successes since taking office, said David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Among them, raising public awareness about the Chinese threat to Taiwan, and pledging to increase the island’s defence budget to more than three percent of GDP.
But foreign affairs have been more fraught with “a lot of uncertainty” under US President Donald Trump over Washington’s policy towards Taiwan, China and the region, Sacks said.
While China has already decided that “Lai was not somebody that they wanted to work with”, he said.
Silver lining
Analysts said the ongoing hostility between the DPP and KMT was eroding public confidence in Taiwan’s political institutions, bolstering Beijing’s narrative that Taiwanese people would be better off as part of China.
Beijing has ramped up military pressure on Taiwan in recent years, deploying fighter jets and warships on a near daily basis and staging several large-scale drills around the island since Lai took office.
Taiwan accuses China of also using espionage, cyberattacks and disinformation to weaken its defences.
Lai branded China a “foreign hostile force” in March, angering Beijing and drawing criticism from the KMT for being a “troublemaker”.
“The more divided and dysfunctional Taiwan looks within, the easier it is for Beijing to make its case directly to the people of Taiwan,” Hass said.
There could be a silver lining to the chaos if Beijing sees less urgency for military action against Taiwan, said Chen Fang-yu, assistant professor of political science at Soochow University in Taipei.
“All of the efforts by China is working for the opposition parties,” said Chen, pointing to their success in district elections.
“They believe that someday people will be tired of seeing the DPP government because the DPP has been there for three terms,” Chen said.
“For now, maybe China can wait.”
