Ma Ying-jeou doubles as Kuomintang chairman

The road ahead of him is not strewn with roses, of course. He has to lead a fractious party, where the old guard still dominates. Above all, however, he has to get rid of local factionalism which has plagued the party since the early years of President Lee Teng-hui's chairmanship. Lee wanted to continue the democratization that his predecessor Chiang Ching-kuo began. In his eagerness to democratize Taiwan, Lee fostered local factionalism that has since become the hot bed of “black and gold” politics that spelt the end of the half-century rule of Taiwan by the Kuomintang with the election of Chen Shui-bian as president in 2000. Black, incidentally, means the mob in Chinese while gold signifies - well, everybody knows - money talking in politics.

The KMT is more than a century old. Chiang Kai-shek made the party Stalinist in order to try to unify China, which was then divided due to conflicts involving warlords and the Communists. Ma has to understand that times have changed. A Stalinist party does not work anymore now. This makes it all the more difficult for him to rebuild the Kuomintang into a truly modern democratic political party.

He is expected to meet a series of daunting challenges as president cum chairman of the ruling party, which controls a majority that exceeds two-thirds in the 113-seat Legislative Yuan or Parliament. One of these challenges that is immediately ahead is the all-important local year-end elections. Eligible voters will go to the polls on December 5 to elect 17 magistrates and mayor across the country. The KMT may lose a couple of the 17 posts at stake.

Will Ma be called to account for any possible losses? Five special municipalities, including Taipei and Kaohsiung, will elect their mayors next year. The elections of 2010 will be a warm-up for the presidential race of 2012. If the KMT should lose these elections next year — and chances are that it may if the economy doesn't improve — this would be seen as a no-confidence vote for President Ma and may mean he will not be reelected in 2012.

We take our hats off to Ma for assuming responsibility for carrying on the liquidation of unlawfully acquired assets of the KMT that he had started at the beginning of his brief previous term as party chairman in 2006. It is a task that is probably more challenging now to tackle. One sure outcome, if it is completed, is that the Kuomintang will be reduced to a party that has to finance all its election campaigns with political donations under strict public oversight.

We wish President Ma every success in his new concurrent role as chairman of the ruling Kuomintang.

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