In Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days in business, a crisis helped stabilize the United States and establish a reliable benchmark for evaluating national success. The phrase” first 100 time” is still most prevalent in the US, but other democracies like Taiwan have since adopted it.
Since the region’s first democratic transition of power in 2000, Chinese people have increasingly used the first 100 days to determine their president’s performance, mirroring the discipline established decades earlier in Washington.
However, Taiwan’s leaders have struggled to maintain the 62 % average approval rating that US president have maintained in their first 100 days since Dwight Eisenhower in 1950. Each Chinese leader has experienced a significant decline in approval since 2000.
For example, president Chen Shui-bian saw his rating plunge from 79 % to 42 % in just four weeks. Ma Ying-jeou and Tsai Ing-wen fared similarly, with ratings of 41 % and 39 %, respectively, at their 100-day marks. Most recently, President Lai Ching-te, inaugurated on May 20, 2024, saw his approval slip from 58 % to 46 % within three months.
Taiwan is starkly different from the US despite recent years indicating that the US has grown more identical. As a younger democracy, Taiwan has less sophisticated democratic norms and deep political polarization.
Since the start of reform in the late 1980s, Taiwan’s politicians have been marred by powerful intellectual clashes, especially over national personality. The main opposition Kuomintang ( KMT ) and the now-ruling Democratic Progressive Party ( DPP ) have a pervasive rift due to this.
This division frequently results in Japanese presidents reversing their predecessor’s policies while avoiding constant opposition assaults for doing so.
President Lai today has a unique opportunity to break the cycle of” correcting” previous services by taking the DPP as the first Chinese president since reform.
Despite having a majority in the KMT and Taiwan People’s Party ( TPP ), Lai has taken an unexpected turn, despite what many believed he would concentrate on promoting party unity to support his ideas and policies.
In contrast to his predecessors, who targeted the criticism, Lai has directed his social hits inside, as evidenced by Cheng Wen-tsan’s arrest as the chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation over fraud allegations that allegedly arose during his time as mayor of Taoyuan City. Cheng’s imprisonment is indicative of an intensive intra-DPP political battle between a pair of long-time rivals.
After winning the unanticipated election for Taoyuan City municipal in 2014, Cheng, a popular figure in the DPP, established himself as a rising sun within the group. He oversaw the KMT’s long-held hold over the area.
In the part, Cheng showed some amazing social skills and the ability to get and join different factions, including KMT supporters, attributes which made him one of Tsai’s recommended successors.
Tsai, also a realist with a less restrictive intellectual position, also reportedly valued Cheng’s flair for coalition-building—a ability she relied on to strengthen her personal power within the DPP.
Lai, by comparison, has garnered solid support from the pro-independence groups within the DPP, who view him as Tsai’s lawful son.
These groups, many of whom found Tsai’s more modest plans to be unfavorable, find him deeply committed to ensuring Taiwan’s freedom from the mainland.
In a shocking move for the DPP, Lai challenged Tsai to become president in a move that was viewed at the time as a proactive force to prevent potential fierce opposition from Cheng in 2024.
Although Lai’s campaign eventually failed, causing him to visit Tsai’s national ticket as her sin national running mate, it heightened his conflict with Cheng because Tsai showed more bias toward Cheng in the run-up to this January election.
After gaining energy, Lai has been forced to “punish” Cheng due to his anxious private history. Given that lawyers are supposed to work independently from politics, how can we be sure that Lai was behind Cheng’s confinement on corruption costs?
The case’s timeline provides a powerful clue. Initial findings were made in 2017, but the research was immediately halted as a result of a “lack of evidence.”
It’s therefore incredibly unlikely that a case that remained unsolved for seven years while Tsai’s administration was immediately revived with sufficient evidence to apprehend Cheng shortly after Lai assumed office.
Another telling signal was Tsai’s choice to forgo the DPP federal congress on July 20 because it was likely to have a “schedule discord.” She abstained good to have sparked unrest with Lai following Cheng’s detention, and this congress was essential for the reshuffling of the DPP’s inner power structure.
In their first 100 days, Lai set a major law for a Japanese leader by targeting a prominent figure within his own party, giving internal power struggles precedence over oppositional conflict.
This decision is particularly striking given the DPP’s vulnerable position facing a hostile, opposition-controlled parliament. The DPP’s reputation may be severely harmed by Chen’s detention, which supports one of the numerous corruption allegations that the party has repeatedly refuted in recent years. Yet, Lai chose to remove Cheng regardless, signaling that he was willing to bear the cost.
The DPP may be much stronger than it appears despite having been elected with a minority vote, according to Lai’s early actions.
The party appears confident that its hardline stance against China will continue to be preferred by Taiwanese voters in an era marred by an authoritarian versus democracy narrative, which is currently rife with scandals involving election funding.
Lai’s initial emphasis on intra-party struggles may not necessarily indicate a trend, even though a break from firmly rooted partisan divisions is necessary for Taiwan’s democracy’s future development.
Instead, it might indicate that Taiwanese politics is moving past the two-party cyclical wars and entering a new era of long-term DPP dominance.