Taiwan’s ruling party candidate Lai Ching-te wins presidential election
Ruling-party candidate Lai Ching-te emerged victorious in Taiwan’s presidential election on Saturday and his opponents conceded, a result that will determine the trajectory of the self-ruled democracy’s relations with China over the next four years.
China had called the poll a choice between war and peace. Beijing strongly opposes Lai, the current vice president who abandoned his medical career to pursue politics from the grassroots to the presidency.
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For Tony Chen, a 74-year-old retiree who voted in Taipei in the hour before the polls closed, the election boiled down to a choice between communism and democracy.
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“I hope democracy wins,” he said. He added that more Taiwanese were open to China’s model of governance decades ago, when the Chinese economy was growing by double digits annually, but are repulsed by the crackdown on civil liberties that has occurred under current Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Stacy Chen, 43, said she has always voted for the DPP, because “Taiwan is an independent country.” She said she wanted her son to grow up in a country that is separate from China.
Taiwan’s election was seen as having “real and lasting influence on the geopolitical landscape,” said Gabrielle Reid, associate director with the global intelligence consultancy S-RM.
“The outcome of the vote will ultimately determine the nature of ties with China relative to the West and will have strong bearing on the state of play in the South China Sea,” she said.
Close ties with the United States will likely draw even closer under Lai’s administration.
“A continuation of the DPP into a third term will mean that the warming-up of U.S.-Taiwan ties that we saw in the last eight years will likely continue at pace under the next Lai Ching-te administration,” said Wen-Ti Sung, a fellow with the Washington-based Atlantic Council.
Beijing is likely to deploy a “maximum pressure campaign” to influence the new administration along military, economic and political lines, Sung told The Associated Press.
