On July 26, 2025, Taiwanese voters failed to recall any of 24 Kuomintang legislators from their seats in the Legislative Yuan of the Republic of China. Not one incumbent was ousted.
The final tallies won’t be officially announced until August 1.
The fates of seven more KMT lawmakers will be decided on August 23. An unlikely six victories for the pro-recall side, including victories in the special elections that would follow successful recall votes, are needed to give the DPP a legislative majority.
The last year and a half
In January 2024, the ruling DPP retained the presidency with the election of Lai Ching-te but lost its legislative majority. Although also lacking a majority, KMT lawmakers worked with members of the Taiwan People’s Party to push through measures to undercut President Lai’s pro-defense agenda.
In response to these developments, Taiwanese voters took to the streets in large numbers to protest KMT perfidy and backed campaigns to recall KMT officeholders from power. The KMT side got nowhere with retaliatory campaigns to recall DPP legislators.
Strong nationwide support for ousting the KMT legislators in the 24 districts at issue on July 26 wasn’t enough to displace the incumbents from their particular districts, however.
The election results are dispiriting not least because of the obvious partnership between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang in the recall battle, as in other contexts. The PRC, it must be remembered, seeks to attach Taiwan to itself and has been threatening Taiwan in myriad ways for decades.
A fifth column
The KMT’s purpose “is to weaken Taiwan. They want to sabotage Taiwan from within,” said one campaigner for the recalls, Mitch Yang. “They want to undermine the government so that at the end, the cost for the CCP to invade will be lower.”
Both CCP and KMT insist that the recall campaigns are undemocratic.
“The massive recall against all KMT lawmakers elected only last year is an act to undo the election,” according to KMT member Alexander Huang. “The DPP government refuses to accept the election result.”
The ROC’s democratic institutions include the right of voters to recall an incumbent lawmaker by voting for the recall in sufficient number; then, if the recall succeeds, to vote for someone else in the ensuing special election. The CCP and KMT have never explained what makes the democratic exercise of this democratic feature undemocratic.
It should be unnecessary to add that the KMT, former longtime holder of a monopoly on power on the island, is a late convert to the value of democracy; or that the People’s Republic of China is today, in 2025, a totalitarian party-state, not a democracy. We can grant that the belated conversion to democracy of the former is real if partial and contradictory. However sincere it may be, though, a marginal preference for representative government would become meaningless if, thanks to its appeasements of the mainland, the Kuomintang succeeds in helping the communists gobble up Taiwan and the other islands of the ROC.
No democratic institutions would survive the takeover; only empty forms would remain. The “patriots” allowed to participate in the pseudo-democracy would have no choice but to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party (see Hong Kong).
