Mayoral candidate Chen Chu presses the flesh at a night market in Kaohsiung
She'll need to. Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has occupied the mayor's office in this port city for the past eight years, and as her party's candidate Chen would normally be the odds-on favorite to take the position. But these are not normal times. The DPP is under siege. Its top elected official, President Chen Shui-bian, has been under pressure to resign ever since his wife, Wu Shu-chen, was indicted on Nov. 3 on embezzlement and forgery charges. Prosecutors said they have evidence to charge President Chen too, but he enjoys immunity while in office. The scandal has raised questions about long-term damage to the President's party. Politicians and analysts are looking to the Dec. 9 mayoral elections in Taipei and Kaohsiung for an indication of how badly the DPP has been wounded, and whether the party's problems could carry on to legislative elections next year and the presidential vote in 2008. "If the DPP could pull it out in either one of those races people would say, 'See, it's not completely over for the DPP, they still have some support and they haven't completely lost their mojo,'" says Shelley Rigger, an expert on Taiwan at Davidson College in North Carolina. "If they lose both, their mojo will be indeed very hard to see. They were clobbered in local elections last year. If they lose these two big cities, that's going to be evidence that the public has really turned against them."
With Taipei likely to remain a stronghold of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT), the DPP's hopes ride on Kaohsiung. The city, the world's sixth busiest port, is in southern Taiwan, the DPP's traditional power base, where voters back the party's support for Taiwanese nationalism. But unlike more rural parts of the south, DPP support in Kaohsiung is uneven. While the DPP's Frank Hsieh won mayoral elections in 1998 and 2002, his KMT challenger in the last race, a 64-year-old former university administrator and onetime deputy mayor named Huang Jun-ying, nearly handed him an upset. This year, Huang is back, with a campaign emphasizing economic development and clean government. Hsieh isn't: he cannot seek another term in Kaohsiung and is pursuing the Taipei mayoral seat instead. Polls show KMT candidate Huang leading Chen Chu by about three to nine percentage points.
Though Chen trails in the race, she is in many ways the more charismatic candidate. A founding member of the DPP, she spent six years in prison for her participation in a pivotal 1979 pro-democracy protest against the then-ruling Kuomintang, which came to be known as the Kaohsiung Incident. She is a fiery speaker, and can easily attract hundreds of supporters to public rallies. And she's running a campaign that emphasizes her ties to Hsieh's powerful legacy — her supporters carry signs that say, "Good baton, pass it on." During his six years in office Hsieh led a major cleanup of Kaohsiung's Love River, turning the polluted waterway that runs through the heart of the city into a regional attraction that even Huang acknowledges is a success.
But the DPP's rule in Kaohsiung comes with some baggage. Last year migrant Thai workers on a Kaohsiung mass transit project rioted over poor working conditions; a subsequent investigation led to the indictment of DPP city officials and a former presidential aide on charges of accepting bribes. Chen Chu, Taiwan's labor minister at the time, was not linked to the corruption scandal, but she resigned to take responsibility for the treatment of the Thai workers. And the allegations of corruption against those close to the President are causing the DPP even bigger headaches. "The day of the [First Lady's] indictment was the worst point in the party's history," says Bi-khim Hsiao, a DPP legislator and former adviser to the President.