A Not-So-Minor Minority President?

* DPP's William Lai won the January 13 presidential election with a little more than 40% (40.05% to be exact) of the popular votes. Though the outcome wasn't much of a surprise, Lai's vote total was 17% lower than what Tsai Ing-wen garnered in 2020. Most young voters--those 40 and under--preferred former Taipei Mayor Ke Wen-je over Lai, and there is no indication that things will change anytime soon.

* Kuomintang's Hou You-yi, on the other hand, returned to being the mayor of New Taipei City following the disappointing results. Though many factors were responsible for Hou's defeat, his lack of personal charisma and experience on national issues, just to name a few, were clearly flaws that Hou was never able to recover. At the same time, he's doing his best to stave-off a grassroots-initiated recall campaign and avoid suffering the same fate as former Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu following the 2020 campaign.

* On the other hand, the KMT became the largest party, at 52 seats, in the Legislative Yuan (LY). With two friendly independent allies, the KMT now effectively wields 54 votes in the 113-seat body. The DPP only retained 51 seats, and the Taiwan People's Party (TPP) holds a key minority position with 8 seats.

* The new makeup of the LY could hamper the functioning of the incoming DPP administration. The TPP already made it clear that it intends to utilize its eight seats on legislations deemed critical to its survival and relevance. But there has been so much bad blood between the DPP and TPP, it's unlikely the two two can work closely together and consistently. The same can be said between the KMT and the TPP. Therefore, with LY being unpredictable in the next four years, it remains unclear that how much, and how inclusive, the Lai administration can implement policies that it aims to deliver following a hard-fought campaign.