Strongly partisan politics in the legislature have defined Lai Ching-te's first year as Taiwan's president, while civil defense reforms define how Lai is preparing the country to stand against ever-increasing aggression from Beijing. Where does Lai need to improve in his second year? Hoover Institution research fellow and Stanford University professor Kharis Templeman joins TaiwanPlus to discuss the highs and lows of Lai's first year in office.
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00:00So to start off with, what has been the main features of Lye's first year as president?
00:05Well, I think the most striking feature of Lye's first year as president has been the just constant partisan fighting between the executive branch and the legislature.
00:19I've been a bit surprised at how deep and broad the animosity is between the ruling party, TPP, and the opposition, TPP, and KMT.
00:33I didn't expect it to get this bad this quickly.
00:37So do you believe that this partisanship is a defining challenge of Lye's first year as president?
00:42I think it was an obvious challenge for him from election night on when the results were known.
00:49I mean, he only won 40 percent of the vote, even though he won the election.
00:52And so he was a minority president from day one.
00:56And on top of that, his party, the DPP, lost their majority in the legislature.
01:00And so it was obvious to everyone that he needed some cooperation from the opposition parties to be able to get anything through the legislature.
01:09So I was a bit surprised and a little bit disappointed, frankly, that he did not seem to reach out to the opposition effectively in that window between the election and the seating of the legislature.
01:26And he really has tried as much as possible, seemingly, to ignore the opposition in the legislature.
01:33And I think that is a major source of the kind of problems he's had over the last year.
01:38So as we have been discussing, Lye Qingda's first year has not been without controversy or plenty of challenges.
01:45But what do you think some of his real successes have been?
01:49Well, I think I noted he had a fair amount of continuity with his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen's policies.
01:56In some cases, that's been a really good thing, I think.
01:59None more so than in U.S.-Taiwan relations.
02:02There was some considerable concern in Washington, D.C., when Lye was a candidate to be president, that he would be more challenging to deal with than Tsai Ing-wen, that he would create a fair amount of uncertainty in the U.S.-Taiwan relationship.
02:19And I think, for the most part, he's alleviated some of those concerns.
02:27The real source of uncertainty now in the bilateral relationship is actually on the U.S. side with the new president, Donald Trump, and his kind of unpredictable approach to almost all kinds of foreign policies.
02:40So Lye, by contrast, actually looks like a stabilizing force in the relationship right now.
02:47And I think we ought to give him credit for doing the kind of hard work of alleviating worries about his approach and building up the relationship with American interlocutors.
03:01A related point is on defense and civil society resilience issues.
03:08Lye has kind of stayed the course that Tsai Ing-wen put in place, and if anything, he's really doubled down.