Now that Lien Chan (連戰), the newly installed KMT party chair, has finally acceded to the current Defense Minister Tang Fei's (唐飛) proposed premiership in the coming National Government (全民政府) led by Chen Shui-bien (陳水扁) of the DPP, on the condition that Tang's KMT membership be suspended for now. Still, constitutional scholars are zealously divided over whether the convenient arrangement is in accord with the spirit of party politics.
It all started with the reality that Chen received no more than 40% of the votes cast in the presidential election, where no mechanism is provided to assure an electoral majority before the election in the form of first-past-the-post. Worse yet, the DPP holds only 71 out of the 224 seats of the Legislative Chamber. In order to transmit his elective momentum into an executive winning-coalition, Chen surprised everyone by inviting the outgoing Tang Fe to become the premier after Lee Yuan-tseh refused his offer.
At issue is whether there ought to be a formal pact between the DPP and the KMT. To the extreme, some interpreted the cabinet as an embodiment of the coalition government between the two parties, with the belief that the original text of the Constitution of the Republic of China was designed to be a parliamentary system. In this sense, Chen would be nothing but a figurehead as the British Queen Elizabeth or the Japanese Emperor. Nobody would take this outrageously anachronistic reading serious, especially after the second popular election of presidency.
Citing the constitutional precedent for the co-habitation from the French Fifth Republic, the so-called Reform Faction of the KMT unduly insisted that the appointment of the cabinet members should be in their hands, or at least bargained, since the MKT is enjoying the majority of the legislative seats. If so, why is the premier Vincent Shaw (蕭萬長) stepping down, and why the presidential election at all? The voters have made it plain that they want the KMT out. As the Native Faction may retort, what's the point to wage a constitutional battle after losing a presidential war?
Although the Constitution, amended or not, has shared the generic characteristic of executive dualism with most semi-presidential, or mixed, systems, there is yet no consensus that the present system ought to operate as the mirror image of the French model. Specifically, the French system is said to have automatically switched from the presidential system to a parliamentary whenever the ruling party failed to secure the majority in the National Assembly.
As noted, since the nominated premier is no longer subject to the approval of the legislature after the 4th Constitutional Revisions in 1997, the premier has become the president's de facto chief of staff and is by no means accountable to the legislature. The final parliamentary appendix is the presidential power to dissolve the legislature once a vote-of-nonconfidence is passed.
Why the seemingly over-sized coalition government in short of policy coordination at all? At hand are conspiracy considerations in the sense of a Green-Blue alliance against the People First Party led by James Soong, and a plot to deprive Tang's military influence. Yet, a Grand Coalition may be positively justified as a consociational arrangement that cuts across the mainlander-native ethnic cleavage. This reconciliatory gesture is especially imperative to heed the wound of mutual distrust and animosity after waves of ethnic mobilization in the past decade.
One the way to democratic consolidation, neither Chen nor the DPP alone is able to obtain solid support from the civil society, no to mention the chaotic legislature. Hence, the future government is better characterized as a Lee-Chen regime rather than a Chen-Tang one. There is no denying that it might create difficulty for parties to uphold accountability to the people in the western European style. However, as the party system is undergoing fundamental realignment, voters' mandate seems sufficient to warrant this quasi-war cabinet.
Recently, my son dug out a Tupperware toy from his treasury box to teach his younger sister how to recognize figures. This is a plastic ball with ten holes on it to fill in all sorts of correspondent pieces, such as circle, triangle, rectangle, star, and others. Beyond these, you may chop up any block, say a bar of soap, to fit into the holes. What if there is a bulb? We certainly do not want to break the glass for the sake of the game. Nonetheless, our experts seem to prescribe the opposite.