As we enter 2025, another contentious year in Taiwanese politics seems in the cards, with the passage of three controversial bills by the Legislative Yuan in December. The bills were pushed for by the Kuomintang (KMT), working with its political ally the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).
After many weeks of conflict between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and KMT about the bills, the KMT physically blocked DPP legislators from entering the room for the committee review of the bills. That allowed the KMT to advance the bills with less than three minutes of discussion.
Several days later, DPP legislators barricaded themselves in the legislative assembly chambers, occupying the podium to prevent a repeat incident. But after a night of struggle, they were forcibly removed by KMT legislators. Consequently, the third reading of the three bills in the legislature took place without any DPP legislators present.
If the means by which the bills were passed proved controversial, the content was as well.
The first bill involved raising the benchmark for recalls. ID checks will be required for the signature collections needed to organize recall votes. Moreover, the benchmark for recall votes to be binding will now require more people to vote in the recall vote than during the original election.
The institution of ID checks for signature collection would make it more difficult to collect recall signatories, but the idea has also led to concerns from civil society groups for another reason. Organized crime groups have sometimes been found to engage in vote buying, including during recall or referendum votes. As such, it is possible that ID checks would lead to private information ending up in the hands of criminal gangs.
Likewise, as recall votes generally do not attract as many participants as the original vote, the bill would make it very unlikely that any recall would meet the new benchmark to be binding. This is probably the KMT’s intention. The party originally began pushing for an increase in the benchmark for recalls in order to protect Keelung Mayor George Hsieh from a recall vote.
Previously, in 2020, Han Kuo-yu of the KMT – currently the president of the Legislative Yuan – was recalled from his post as mayor of Kaohsiung.
It is probably the changes to the laws governing recalls that have led to the most anger in society, with members of the public taking the view that the KMT is stealing the citizenry’s constitutional right of recall. Nevertheless, the other two laws will arguably have more significant impact, seeing as it was already difficult for recall votes to be binding under the existing legislation.
The second bill will effectively freeze Taiwan’s Constitutional Court from being able to make rulings. The bill requires a minimum of 10 justices for a ruling to take place. At present, there are only eight justices on the Constitutional Court, with seven justices having retired in October after their terms ended.
Although the Lai administration has proposed new candidates to fill these slots, all candidates were voted down by the KMT. This is likely the KMT’s strategy: if they prevent any new justices from being nominated to the Constitutional Court, the court would be unable to make rulings. The KMT aims to limit the Constitutional Court’s ability to rule against laws it passes using its narrow majority in the legislature, as the court did when it ruled legislative powers sought by the KMT earlier this year to be unconstitutional. In doing so, critics say the KMT is infringing upon the fundamental system of checks and balances between the three main branches of the Taiwanese government.
The third bill aims to siphon away funds from the central government to local governments, which are currently mostly KMT controlled. The amount of funding that goes to local governments will be increased to 60 percent from the current 25 percent.
It has been a recurring theme in Taiwanese politics in the last few years for KMT local governments to argue that the central government does not provide them with enough resources. Yet the KMT’s intent is likely to undercut the central government’s funding.
This move has led to warnings from the DPP that Taiwan’s defense budget, inclusive of the domestic submarine program and other high-profile initiatives, will be slashed. Before the bill, the KMT had already sought to reduce Taiwan’s defense budget and blocked the national budget from passing for months.
The cut to the central government’s budget will also affect social programs, such as rental subsidies, cancer screening programs, subsidies for electric buses, and childcare programs. According to Chen Shu-tzu, who leads the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, the cuts will decrease all government programs by 28 percent. If defense spending is maintained at its current level, under the new law all other government programs will have their funding cut by 37 percent.
The controversy comes at a time when the United States has increasingly called on Taiwan to increase its defense spending from the current level of around 2.5 percent of GDP to 5 percent of GDP or more. That the projected cut to government programs would be so large attests to the fact that Taiwan already spends a significant portion of its annual budget on defense.
Having funding be reallocated to local governments has been criticized as a form of pork barrel politics. A wide-ranging infrastructure bill for Taiwan’s eastern coast proposed by the KMT earlier this year faced similar criticism.
Other legislation proposed by the KMT with the aim of benefiting the elderly has been perceived in a similar light, seeing as the party’s voters are often older. For example, a proposal to exempt seniors who pay under 20 percent income tax from needing pay premiums to the National Health Insurance (NHI) system was seen as benefiting seniors who already are in a high-income tax bracket. The change would led to a loss of 54 billion Taiwan dollars (US$1.6 billion) in revenue for the NHI, threatening the fiscal stability of the health insurance system.
While continued contention in the legislature is likely in the upcoming year, it is unclear what the DPP’s strategy to deal with the KMT’s moves will be. The response from the public also bears watching. In 2024’s Bluebird Movement, 15,000 protesters demonstrated overnight outside of the Legislative Yuan on the night that the KMT forced through the controversial bills expanding legislative power, with some attempting to break into the legislature. Taiwan has seen few overnight protests of such scale or intensity since the 2014 Sunflower Movement.
President Lai Ching-te referenced the contention in his new year’s address, but offered few specifics besides “consolidat[ing] democracy with democracy” and framing the DPP as attempting to defend the constitution. Previous comments by Lai about “responding with even greater democracy” were interpreted as the president suggesting the DPP may seek a referendum on the issue, but that does not appear to be the case.
The Executive Yuan can request a constitutional interpretation on the bills, which is the likely scenario. In that case, the Constitutional Court may again strike down the laws. The Constitutional Court would likely act to defend its powers, given the KMT’s attempt to limit the ability of the court to make judgments.
Either way, political discourse about the laws has become deeply partisan, with both the DPP and KMT claiming that the other side’s moves are tantamount to martial law. This claim occurs because recent events in South Korea – involving an abortive declaration of martial law by President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was subsequently impeached – have been watched closely in Taiwan.
Certainly, there seems to be no end in sight to the pitched rhetoric of both sides.