Legislators Propose Formation of "Coalition Government"

In mid-July, as the usually circumspect Legislative Yuan speaker Wang Jin-pyng pressed the case for a "coalition government," KMT chairman Lien Chan stated that his party, with its legislative majority, should be allowed to form the cabinet in order to break the deadlock between the executive and legislative branches. Both proposals were promptly dismissed by Presidential Office deputy secretary-general Chen Che-nan, who described them as efforts to counter the president's "government of all the people." Chen further ridiculed the KMT for still trying to extract a share of the electoral spoils despite having lost the election.

In fact, this is not the first time that proposals for a coalition cabinet, or coalition government, have been aired since the advent of the new administration. In the past two months the new government, facing a still-powerful KMT opposition in parliament, has been hamstrung in its ability to implement policy initiatives. Bills are typically revised beyond recognition once the legislators get hold of them, as exemplified by ongoing ructions over a bill limiting the number of hours in the working week. Li Wen-chung, former deputy convenor of the DPP parliamentary caucus, recently called for Chen Shui-bian to establish a coalition cabinet, and although Chen Che-nan described this as the view of an individual legislator, it emerged that the new administration, stymied by KMT pressure in the legislature, is urgently seeking to form some kind of alliance with other opposition parties in order to break the current impasse.

There is a feeling in the legislature that the new administration has avoided responding to legislators' policy concerns, demonstrating its lack of interest in consultation and communication. With the start, on July 4, of the first general interpellation session in the legislature since the administration took office, relations between the executive and legislative branches slumped to a new low. Wang Jin-pyng's calls for a "coalition government" have thus been seen as the first sally under the KMT's new tactical approach.

On the subject of the legislature's uncompromising stance, Chen Shui-bian says that the new government shouldn't be confined by the requirements of the previous parliament. If legislators repeatedly impede the introduction of new policies then the president can dissolve parliament and force an early election, enabling "new public opinion" to shape a legislature better geared to the workings of the new government. The notions of "old" and "new" public opinion quickly became topics of heated debate.

The administration's sticky predicament in its first two months has convinced many that the "government of all the people" will eventually succumb to constitutional convention, and that the president will have to resort to a party-based form of administration. Now that constitutional amendments have all but drained the National Assembly of authority, any party that controls more than half the seats in the legislature can reduce the Executive Yuan to the role of "executive office" of the Legislative Yuan.

The focus of the issue has therefore shifted to how Taiwan's constitutional apparatus should best be run. Academics have characterized today's political quagmire as an aftereffect of the constitutional revisions jointly engineered by the KMT and DPP in 1997. At that time the main proponents of reform felt that a "semi-presidential system" would be the most workable option for Taiwan, based of course on the assumption that the executive would be run by the same party that held a majority in the legislature. But with today's ruling party holding only a minority of seats in parliament, the triangular relations among the Presidential Office, Executive Yuan and Legislative Yuan have slipped out of balance. Hence the current dispute over the virtues of a "government of all the people" versus rule by individual political parties.

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During general interpellations, the opposition piled on the pressure for the new administration. (photo by Chang Liang-yi)