--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
--:-- Noel King: Some of my employer Vox are calling it the biggest election year in history. Billions of people are expected to vote in elections in the next 11 months. Taiwan on Saturday is among the first. It's a young democracy, first held a presidential election in 1996, which is something Taiwanese are very proud of.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: I love the fact that Taiwan has done away with strongman politics. A great nation doesn't need a strongman cult, but a civil society. That's what makes a mature society.
--:-- Noel King: As they go to the polls to pick a president, Taiwanese will be choosing between a progressive candidate and a candidate who wants much closer ties to China. The race is close, though voters do agree on one thing. I've worked to lots of people on all sides of the political spectrum who made the point that democracy shouldn't be taken for granted or something to defend.
--:-- Noel King: And whoever they're voting for, they're very excited to have that opportunity. That's coming up on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, Anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Noel King: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com. AI agents are getting pretty impressive. You might not even realize you're listening to one right now. We work 24-7 to resolve customer inquiries. No hold music, no canned answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noel King. Amy Hawkins is The Guardian's senior China correspondent, and she's been covering Taiwan's Saturday election, where three parties are in contention.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: Yeah, so there are two main parties, the Democratic Progressive Party, the DPP, which is currently in power, and then the main opposition party, which is the Kuomintang, or the KMT, which has historically ruled Taiwan but hasn't been in power for the past eight years. And then there's this newcomer party called the Taiwan People's Party or the TPP, which was only founded in 2019 and is disrupting the race a bit.
--:-- Noel King: In terms of how to remember them, I mean, the Democratic Progressive Party is the most progressive of the three parties in terms of social affairs. You know, they're the party that oversaw the legalization of gay marriage. They've pushed gender equality.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: So even though much of this year's election campaign is about China and geopolitical issues, you can think of the DPP as being the progressive party. The Kuomintang is the party that has historically come from mainland China. It lost to the communists at the end of the Chinese Civil War and then fled to Taiwan. They have this kind of very historic connection to China.
--:-- Noel King: And then the Taiwan People's Party is the newest one. OK, so if we hear DPP, we think D for democracy. Yeah. KMT, Kuomintang, committed, sounds a little like Kuomintang, committed to China. That's how I'm going to remember it. And TPP, we don't have to think about them very much. They're new.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: All right. So you've been there. You've been talking to voters. What are the big issues in this election?
--:-- Amy Hawkins: So a major issue has been the question of how to deal with China. And this is always a theme in Taiwanese politics. It's especially prominent this time around. Warships and fighter jets keep coming from China as intimidation. When we have such an aggressive neighbor, we must protect our territory.
--:-- Noel King: The history goes back to 1949, which was the end of the Chinese Civil War in mainland China, where the communists were fighting the nationalists. The nationalists are the KMT. And so when they lost in the civil war, they fled to Taiwan and declared the Republic of China based in Taipei, while the communists declared the People's Republic of China, which is the communist country we know today in Beijing.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: And ever since then, it's kind of been unfinished business for the communists to kind of defeat that last bit of KMT success. And they've always said they want to unify Taiwan with the mainland. But Xi Jinping, more than any other previous leader since Mao, has made it a really top priority. He seemed to see it as part of his legacy.
--:-- Noel King: Obviously, he's getting older. And he said that this problem, as he describes it, can't be passed down from generation to generation. In his New Year's Day speech recently, he said that... The reunification of China is a historical inevitability. And compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should join hands and share the great glory of national rejuvenation.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: And he hasn't ruled out the use of force for doing so. And, you know, increasingly, any kind of political cooperation with Taiwan looks less and less likely. So that leaves fewer options that aren't military force. And then, of course, like any election, lots of people care about the economy. There's lots of domestic issues, particularly for young people. Wages have been stagnant for a long time. Housing is increasingly unaffordable. People feel like there aren't enough good jobs.
--:-- Noel King: So the kind of issues that would motivate voters in any democracy are also very important in Taiwan. My personal priority is to have a better life. As for international matters like relations with China, I feel that they are a little detached from us.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: So let's talk through the three parties, especially the big ones, the DPP and the KMT. Where do they stand? Where do they stand on these issues? Where do they stand in particular on China?
--:-- Amy Hawkins: Yeah, so the front-runner candidate is a man called Lai Ching-de, who is the current vice president to Tsai Ing-wen. They're from the DPP. Democratic. The Democratic Progressive Party, who is seen as being the most kind of pro-independence, although they don't formally support Taiwanese independence, but they are the most in favor of a sovereign Taiwanese identity that's very distant from China.
--:-- Noel King: And Lai, more than Tsai, the current president, has a history of promoting Taiwanese independence. He previously described himself as a pragmatic worker for Taiwanese independence. He seen by some as being quite radical We must abide by the truth which is what I mean by pragmatism It is that Taiwan is already a sovereign independent country called the Republic of China It's not part of the People's Republic of China.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: But he's massively kind of softened down that rhetoric in this presidential campaign because he doesn't want to seem like someone who's going to rock the boat and someone who's going to provoke China. And he's very much kind of stayed close to Tsai Ing-wen's rhetoric, which is about Taiwan doesn't need to formally declare independence because it already effectively is independent.
--:-- Noel King: And through that strategy, Tsai Ing-wen has won lots of friends in Washington and around the world.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: What about the KMT committed to China? What is this candidate saying?
--:-- Amy Hawkins: Yeah, so the KMT's candidate is a man called Ho Yeo Yi. He's a former police officer and quite popular mayor of New Taipei. He has a quite kind of avuncular, everyman persona. I was at a rally of his recently, and rather than coming on stage from behind the scenes, he walked through the crowds and everyone was grabbing him and trying to touch him like some kind of rock star.
--:-- Noel King: And he's quite a strategic, clever pick for the KMT because they've historically been seen as a kind of more elitist, out-of-touch party because they're the party that came from China in 1949. and have ruled Taiwan for most of its history since then.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: They've typically controlled the government. They've controlled the big companies. And lots of Taiwanese people kind of see them as being the elite. So through picking Hoyo Yi as their candidate, they're kind of pivoting towards this idea of being the more everyman, looking out for normal people, like working class party.
--:-- Noel King: All right. And then there is the TPP. We're not paying them a ton of attention because they are the third party in this. But tell me about who their candidate is and what this person wants.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: Yeah, I mean, the TPP is quite an interesting kind of disruptive to this race because their candidate, Ko Wen-je, who founded the party in 2019, he has made it really close. He's actually shown huge level of support in recent weeks. He's had tens of thousands of people coming out to his rallies.
--:-- Noel King: And some people do think he's been underestimated. He's a surgeon turned politician. And his pitch to voters is that he's a pragmatist, he's a technocrat. He's not this kind of political ideologue. He's just going to look for a very practical way forward.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: A real important principle is we have to think of a way to have dialogue with China and not just always tell them no, because after no, there is no other step. He doesn't have a huge amount in terms of concrete policies for dealing with China. He's focused more on domestic issues. But that has proved really popular, particularly with the younger voters.
--:-- Noel King: I mean, there was polling from a few weeks ago, which showed kind of huge amounts of support among under 40 voters compared to the other two parties.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: All right. So the stakes for Taiwanese are quite high here. The stakes for China are quite high here. What about this election is so important that much of the rest of the world is glued to the outcome?
--:-- Amy Hawkins: I think it's because, you know, whoever wins this election, it will set the tone of cross-straight relations between China and Taiwan for years to come. And it comes at a moment when military and geopolitical tensions are kind of as high as they've ever been.
--:-- Noel King: And so if the DPP wins on Saturday, you know, there are many concerns that that could really anger Beijing. At the very least, they're likely to respond economically with trade sanctions on Taiwan. And any conflict in Taiwan wouldn't just affect Taiwan. It would affect the global economy. It would affect regional security.
--:-- Amy Hawkins: And even though it's a very small island democracy, it would have ramifications around the world.
--:-- Noel King: That was Amy Hawkins of The Guardian.
--:-- Noel King: Now, during the break, let's see how many countries you can name that are holding elections this year in 2024. Tweet your answers to at Sean Ramosfaram.
--:-- Noel King: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio? Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Noel King: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model. According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Noel King: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data. And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Noel King: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Noel King: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Noel King: This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers. The Titanium Apple Card is no different. It's laser-etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple.
--:-- Noel King: Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com.
--:-- Noel King: If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, LifeKit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change from fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout.
--:-- Noel King: Each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with LifeKit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away.
--:-- Noel King: Enough from me. Go listen to the show, LifeKit. It's a podcast from NPR.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. Brian Walsh is an editorial director at Fox. Now, he just wrote a piece for Vox in which he pointed out that it is not just Taiwan going to the polls. People in more than 50 countries are going to vote this year.
--:-- Brian Walsh: Presidential elections, legislative elections, governor elections, local elections. It's really a banner year for, if not democracy, at least the act of having elections.
--:-- Noel King: Can you name all the countries? I can definitely not name all the countries. I can name a few of the countries. Name the big ones.
--:-- Brian Walsh: Okay. Some of the big ones are Bangladesh actually was just had its election Sunday. We'll talk about Taiwan, which is going to have its election shortly.
--:-- Brian Walsh: Other big ones are Indonesia in February. With current President Joko Widodo limited to two terms, the country will choose a new leader. Pakistan, India, the single biggest democracy, will have its general elections in April, May. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is vying for a third term. And by all estimates, he's going to have a swift win.
--:-- Brian Walsh: Europe will have its parliamentary elections in June. And of course, you know, we have the United States coming up in November. Whether democracy is still America's sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. And it's what the 2024 election is all about.
--:-- Noel King: All right, let's situate Taiwan within this list that you've given us. What are kind of the stakes in the Taiwanese election as you see them in this context?
--:-- Brian Walsh: So the Taiwanese election is really interesting. Taiwan was only became a democracy really in the 1990s. But now it's really one of the most vibrant, highly contested, fair and freest democracies in all of Asia.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And the real importance here is almost no matter who wins, you will continue to have these tensions between Taiwan, which views itself as kind of a de facto independent country, even though it's only recognized by a few countries diplomatically around the world.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And of course, China, which views Taiwan, frankly, as a rogue province that it tends to reunify by peaceful or other means at some point.
--:-- Brian Walsh: So that tension will continue. And there's a real concern, both because should forceful reunification happen, should military action happen, it could potentially wipe out, as I said, one of the best democracies in all of Asia.
--:-- Brian Walsh: But also it would obviously have major human costs if the U.S. got involved. It would also have really huge ramifications for the global economy. Most of the semiconductors in the world, the computer chips or everything from your phone to your car to your microwave, are made out of Taiwan.
--:-- Brian Walsh: So it does quite matter who's in charge of that country. It also matters what's going to happen after it.
--:-- Noel King: So you said something interesting there, which is that in Taiwan, there are many issues on the ballot, but democracy itself is also on the ballot. The same thing is happening in our United States. Democracy on the ballot, right, 2024.
--:-- Brian Walsh: Is that going on elsewhere? That's really the story around the world. There's really surprisingly few countries where, you know, you feel secure that no matter who wins, you know, democracy will continue.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And that's because by almost every standard, every international monitor, we've seen real democratic backsliding happening over the last 10 years.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And what that means is that even as countries continue to have elections, you begin to lose the real quality of democracy, which is free and fair elections, not just elections period.
--:-- Brian Walsh: You begin to sort of see where, you know, people in power will penalize or even criminalize their opponents. We're seeing that in a lot of different countries.
--:-- Brian Walsh: It's not often you see opposition party supporters gathered openly like this, and they won't be allowed to for long. This is an election in name, certainly, but there's only one political view that matters here, and it isn't theirs.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And the concern really is, when we say democracy is on the ballot, it, should the results of these elections be seen to continue to strengthen those kind of quasi-democratic autocrats, you'll start to see even less real democracy around the world.
--:-- Brian Walsh: You might still see campaigns, you might still see elections, but they'll be kind of not real.
--:-- Noel King: There have been, as you point out in your piece, there have been lots of other systems other than democracy. Democracy is not guaranteed, right? It's not like, oh, you just get a democracy because you decide that you want one.
--:-- Brian Walsh: Is that one of the challenges that you see, Brian, the fact that if you want a democracy, you really do need to vote and to fight to get it, to keep it?
--:-- Brian Walsh: I think absolutely that's one of the challenges. Elections are the quickest thing you can do in a democracy. We know how those work. But there are so many other things that need to happen to have a real free and fair representative government that go beyond an election.
--:-- Brian Walsh: You have to have norms about how elections are contested, actually. You have to have norms about how politicians act in power. Sometimes there are laws around them. More often, they're simply social norms.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And look, we know very well from the example of the United States and Donald Trump that even in a democracy that in many ways is the world's oldest continuous democracy, there's no guarantee that continues.
--:-- Brian Walsh: So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And once those norms are broken, they're really hard to put back together.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And I think the last thing here is with these young democracies is that often you initially have that experience. You have a burst of freedom. People really appreciate that. But, you know, just because you have a doc, no actually does not mean your country will be well run. Doesn't mean you will have prosperity.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And often people can turn against democracy, turn against those in power when they feel that their needs or whether material or otherwise are not being met.
--:-- Brian Walsh: That is very difficult to overcome just because democracy is, we think for this, a freest system of government doesn't mean it's always gonna be the most efficient.
--:-- Brian Walsh: Put all those together, like you have not just, I think, a backslide against democracy, but a backlash against some of the aspects of it that make it difficult to run, really, you know, that make it a harder system of government than other ones.
--:-- Noel King: Right. I mean, this is why authoritarians at times seem very convincing, right? It's like, oh, somebody just takes power and like gets shit done. Fine. We don't have to deal with the democratic process.
--:-- Brian Walsh: What is your informed take on what happens if 2024 is simply not a good year for democracy worldwide? What does that look like?
--:-- Brian Walsh: Yeah, I think it's depressing, quite honestly. You know, as I said, we've had years of democratic backsliding here in the United States, which, you know, I agree with President Biden when he calls the U.S. The beacon of democracy for the world.
--:-- Brian Walsh: That shouldn't be understood as then the United States is a perfect democracy. Rather, it is a bellwether. And if we can't keep it functioning here, it's very hard to see it functioning around the world.
--:-- Brian Walsh: Honestly, if we continue to see this, we see no arrest to this trend. I do worry quite a lot about the future.
--:-- Brian Walsh: I'd love to come up with a more optimistic spin on it. Other than to say that, you know, there have been cycles in the past that like sometimes you see, you know, growing autocracy, it then overreaches. You see a sort of civil movement that can push it back.
--:-- Brian Walsh: I would hope that happening in this case. And, of course, I think it's important to remember that as much as we worry about how fair these elections are going to be around the world, it is really notable that this many people are participating in the democratic process in some way.
--:-- Brian Walsh: Because that was simply not the case until fairly recently. You go back to the immediate post-war era. A lot of countries obviously were not democratic. You had the entire communist sphere as well.
--:-- Brian Walsh: If we all work together to maintain and strengthen our democratic ideals, communism will never be a serious threat to our American way of life.
--:-- Brian Walsh: Go back even further, and there's a handful of democracies at best. Even countries like the United States really don't become liberal democracies, meaning democracies where everyone has a chance to participate until the post-civil rights era.
--:-- Brian Walsh: So even the opportunity to have democracy on the scale is fairly recent. That makes me feel better, I suppose.
--:-- Brian Walsh: But then I look at the more recent trends and I do get worried.
--:-- Noel King: You know, on Today Explained, we covered the Polish election last year. Poland famously was backsliding, backsliding, backsliding. Then these elections happen and Poland slides forward. Poland won. Democracy has won. We have removed them from power. This is one of the most beautiful days of Poland's democracy.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And I have no doubt that this day will go down in our history as a day that opens a new era and the rebirth of our republic.
--:-- Noel King: That one really shocked me and made me think, we all talk a lot about the death of democracy, but you just never know what people voting are going to want, what they decide is most important to them.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And sometimes it seems they decide this bigger ideal of democracy is more important than who can get the roads paved.
--:-- Noel King: That's absolutely true. And you're absolutely right about the Polish elections. That surprised me as well. It heartened me as well.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And I think, you know, what happened there is kind of characteristic of what can happen in these situations, which is you had a party in power that was becoming increasingly autocratic. It begins to overreach. And even people who may not, you know, they're not the people who are going to come to the streets to protest for democracy, but they don't want to live in a country where they don't feel free.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And that can lead to that kind of different backlash, backlash against that creeping autocracy.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And one thing to keep in mind is that, you know, when you look around the world, there was a really interesting survey done by Open Society Foundations last year, 36,000 people across 30 countries, more than 80% of them said they wanted to live in a democracy.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And when I look at that, what I take from it is that there is a close to universal yearning for democracy. It is seen as the type of government that one should have in the world today.
--:-- Brian Walsh: And if they can keep that focus, I mean, that does give me some hope for the future.
--:-- Noel King: That was Vox's own Brian Walsh.
--:-- Noel King: Today's episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn. Amina El-Sadi is our editor and David Herman is our engineer. Laura Bullard did God's work on today's show. She's our fact checker. I'm Noel King. It's Today Explained.
