Taiwan’s Great Recall Movement has come to an end, with the second round of recall voting that took place on August 23 having the same outcome as the earlier round of voting in late July – all seven KMT legislators that faced recall retained their seats. A separate referendum on extending the lifespan of the Ma-anshan nuclear power plant, which was decommissioned earlier this year after reaching the end of its 40-year lifespan, did not meet benchmarks to be binding.
The Great Recall Movement was a historic event, in that there had never before been an attempt to recall all legislators belonging to a specific political party. The movement emerged as a reaction to a number of controversial actions taken by the Kuomintang (KMT) and its third-party ally, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), since they assumed control of the legislature in February 2024. This included the largest series of government budget cuts in Taiwanese history earlier this year, as well as seeking to grant legislators controversial powers of investigation last year.
When the Constitutional Court struck down these powers, the KMT froze the court from operation. New legislation requires a minimum of justices for Taiwan’s highest legal body to make judgments, and the KMT has since blocked any new appointments to the Constitutional Court to make it impossible to reach that quorum.
Recalls are a constitutional right in Taiwan, allowing for politicians to be removed from office if more than 25 percent of the electorate in a voting district is in favor. For months, recall campaigners across Taiwan gathered signatures in the Great Recall Movement, eventually gathering enough to hold recall votes targeting 31 KMT legislators in two waves of voting.
For the balance of power to change in the legislature, six KMT legislators would have had to be recalled and six non-KMT legislators elected in their place. Yet the first and larger wave of recall voting in July did not manage to recall a single KMT legislator. Consequently, it was also expected that the second recall on August 23 would similarly fail.
KMT legislators who faced recalls in August hailed from New Taipei, Hsinchu, Taichung, and Nantou. All candidates survived by large margins, with two votes against the recall for every vote for the recall for all seven legislators.
Among those who faced recalls in this round of voting was Legislative Yuan Vice President Johnny Chiang, a former party chair who the KMT is likely to field as the next Taichung mayoral candidate (current Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen expected to run for president). Yen Kuan-heng, the scion of the Taichung-based Yen political family – long alleged to have links to organized crime – was another candidate who was up for recall. Most controversial of all, however, was probably Nantou legislator Ma Wen-chun, currently the KMT co-chair of the legislature’s defense committee, who faces allegations of passing on confidential details of Taiwan’s domestic submarine program to the Chinese government.
The separate referendum on the Ma-anshan nuclear power plant saw over 4.3 million voting in favor of restarting the reactor, while 1.5 million were against it. However, the referendum did not meet benchmarks to be binding. For a national referendum to pass in Taiwan, 25 percent of the electorate would have to be in favor, which would be just over 5 million voters.
The Ma-anshan nuclear power plant referendum took place nationally, while voting for the seven KMT legislators was only in the districts they represent. The KMT and TPP did not campaign to hold a national referendum by collecting signatures, as has usually occurred in the past with referendums, instead pushing the referendum through the legislature using its current majority. The consequence was that the referendum was less discussed compared to the recalls. But with close to 6 million voters overall, compared to the just over 800,000 who voted in the recalls, turnout was still national.
The KMT has historically been the pro-nuclear party in Taiwanese politics, while the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is historically anti-nuclear. However, the DPP took no official stance on the issue this time around. The DPP has gradually shifted positions on nuclear energy under Lai Ching-te, due to concerns about energy supply in the event of a Taiwanese invasion. The Lai administration’s stance is that it is not against advanced nuclear technology and that it would consider restarts in the event of an invasion.
The shutdown of the Ma-anshan plant, as Taiwan’s final operating nuclear power plant, took place as the reactor reached its planned obsolescence. Nuclear energy was around 4 percent of Taiwan’s energy mix last year.
The latest referendum was the third referendum on nuclear energy in Taiwan in a decade, with a 2018 referendum having voted down the government’s goal for phasing out nuclear energy, and a 2021 referendum having voted down restarting the Lungmen nuclear reactor.
As with the Lungmen reactor before it, the KMT depicted the decommissioning of the Ma-anshan plant as a symbol of the Lai administration’s irrational hostility to nuclear energy, which the KMT has traditionally framed as the most reliable form of power for Taiwan. Pushing for the referendum was likely aimed at driving up turnout for the recall vote, as the KMT could have used its control of the legislature to push for an earlier referendum date – before the decommissioning process started.
It is probable that the KMT will frame the referendum result as suggesting that the public is in favor of nuclear energy so as to continue to attack the Lai administration on the issue. Even if the referendum was not binding, the result is clearly one that the KMT can live with.
The question at hand is whether the KMT will be chastened by the pushback against it that led to the recalls, or whether it continues with the actions that led to the Great Recall Movement, buoyed by the clean-sweep rejection of all the recall votes.
At its heart, the Great Recall Movement was motivated by perceptions that the KMT’s attempt to expand legislative powers at the expense of other branches of government was coming at China’s behest. Critics cited frequent trips to Hong Kong or China by KMT legislative caucus leader Fu Kun-chi. Another KMT legislators, Weng Hsiao-ling, proposed decriminalizing public expressions of loyalty to the PRC for government officials and members of the military and publicly stated that she views herself as Chinese. It is possible that KMT legislators will try to moderate their pro-China image going forward – or perhaps they will go the opposite direction, deciding that the defeat of the recalls shows that the public has no issue with such views.
The stakes have been set for the upcoming KMT chair race, with current chair Eric Chu having signaled that he may step aside for Lu Shiow-yen. The chair race is likely to further stoke speculation about who will be the KMT’s presidential nominee.
Meanwhile, after the recalls, the DPP is going to reshuffle the Cabinet to place it on a new footing for local elections next year.