2022 Taiwanese Local Elections: A Full Report

On November 26, Taiwanese people elected their new mayors or magistrates and legislators of the local administrative divisions in Taiwan. Photo: Pei Chen / The Central News Agency 

Taiwanese local elections, also known as Taiwanese midterm elections, were held Nov. 26, in which Taiwanese people elected new chiefs of the counties and cities, townships, and villages (the three levels of administrative regions in Taiwan), and new legislators for the first two levels. Their results turned out to be an overall victory of the Chinese Kuomintang Party (KMT) over the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the current ruling party of Taiwan. 

KMT continued to be the largest party in terms of the number of local chiefs and legislators, holding significantly more seats than the DPP, the second largest party, in all local levels of government. Nonetheless, compared to local elections in 2018, both parties lost seats in all the levels except for the DPP gaining a significant 39 seats in city and county legislation. 

Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), which rapidly rose to the third largest political party in Taiwan after being founded in 2019 by Ko Wen-je, a formerly unaffiliated statesman who has served eight years as the mayor of Taipei, gained seats from the two major parties in all the local elections this year. The number of unaffiliated winning candidates also increased drastically. More details are summarized in the chart below.

KMT continued its victory over the DPP since 2018, with the TPP and the unaffiliated candidates on the rise as well. Data: Government of the Republic of China (Taiwan) / 2022 Taiwanese Local Elections / Voting outcomes 

In the elections, the most watched is the victory in Taipei's Mayoral Election of the KMT candidate Chiang Wan-an, who is the great-grandson of Chiang Kai-shek, the late president of the Republic of China ruling Taiwan from 1945 to 1975. Chiang received 42.29 percent  of the popular votes. “ We bring back the blue sky back to Taipei”, said Chiang after he declared victory.

Tsai Ing-wen, the incumbent president of Taiwan (ROC), resigned as the chairwoman of the DPP Nov. 26. She claimed that the DPP humbly accepted the election outcomes and the decision of the Taiwanese people and that she “must shoulder all the responsibilities” for the DPP’s loss. Tsai suggested that the DPP should reflect on itself in its failure to break through the local political structures and to meet people’s expectations in local governance and talent cultivation. “We failed to move Taiwanese people again,” stressed Tsai. Some analysts believe that Tsai’s resignation may cause more fierce competition within the DPP for the party’s nominee in the 2024 presidential election.

Zhu Fenglian, the speaker of The Taiwan Affairs Office of mainland China, stated that the election outcomes reflected Taiwanese public opinion as “peace-, stability-, and welfare-oriented.” According to Zhu, mainland China will continue to cooperate with Taiwanese people to develop a peaceful cross-strait relation that elevates the welfare of both Taiwanese and mainlanders, to firmly oppose Taiwanese separatism and foreign interference, and construct a bright future for the Chinese nation.

However, experts point out that the victory of KMT, the party largely considered as pro-China in Taiwan, should not be seen as a sign of Taiwanese affinity to mainland China and KMT’s advantage in the following presidential election in 2024, since local governance rather than cross-strait relations is the major issue in local elections. The DPP’s anti-China strategy was not influential in local elections; and the DPP was widely criticized for its policies on internal issues such as coronavirus containment and vaccination, economic growth, transportation infrastructure, and air pollution. 

Hence, the election outcome is more a DPP’s defeat than a KMT’s victory, said Hsieh Ta-wen, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Sociology, National Taiwan University. As some analysts argued, it is too early to tell how the election outcomes would influence the DPP’s performance in the 2024 presidential election.