Electioneering

When I arrived in Taiwan they were just about to have parliamentary, and presidential elections. Taiwan has two main political parties the Kuomintang and the DPP. The Kuomintang is the same party that ran China before first the Japanese, then the communists took over. I'm not going to go into the whole war now, but suffice it to say that at the end of the war the losing Kuomintang fled to the island of Taiwan. With US help they were able to keep the communists from coming after them there and set up their own government. Today it is a real multiparty democracy, but for a long time it was run as a dictatorship or one party state with the Kuomintang in control. Today despite a dubious history the Kuomintang competes as just a normal political party, and oddly enough is seen as more friendly the China's government than the more independent minded DPP. The DPP ran things for a while but recently the Kuomintang have been back in control winning the last presidential election in a landslide. People said the Kuomintang were not in as good a position for this election, but given how big they won last time would probably hang on to the government. In some ways I could have almost missed that the election was going on, schools were still in secession, no one mentioned the election to a tourist like me, but in other ways it was everywhere. There were giant ads up on a lot of the buildings with smiling pictures of people running for various offices. The ads were all so similar I'm guess they must have had to follow a standard template. The most interesting thing though was these little parades they would have for some party or candidate. Parade isn't really the right word, but I can't find a better one. Every once in a while I'd hear a lot of noise and see a truck covered in ads blaring out some speech or message while smiling people road on top, maybe the candidate, and other followed behind waving little party flags. The biggest one of these I saw involved several trucks, maybe a hundred people, and a bunch of bicycles. The Taiwanese thought it was interesting that a foreigner was taking such a big interest in these little parades, but while I've seen political rallies and people handing out pamphlets before I've never seen anything quite like this. I also noticed that a majority of the participants were older people. I guess that's the same in any country, the old vote.