A rupture between Taiwan’s two opposition parties over a mayoral race threatens to spill into November’s elections and erode the fragile trust underpinning their potential 2028 alliance.
The main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and smaller Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have both registered candidates for mayor of Zhubei, the biggest city in Hsinchu county, after weeks of negotiations failed to produce a joint contender.
The KMT has nominated Hsinchu county councillor Wu Hsu-chih, while the TPP’s Chiu Chen-yuan, a former deputy mayor of Hsinchu city, registered on Thursday and vowed to stay in the race.
The confrontation has exposed sharply different interpretations of an earlier understanding over electoral cooperation, prompting warnings that the dispute could hurt the opposition in Zhubei, the Hsinchu county magistrate race and other battlegrounds.
More importantly, analysts said it could damage the mutual trust the KMT and TPP would need to jointly challenge the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in the 2028 election for the island’s highest office.
“An election is like a battlefield. A seemingly insignificant split can produce a ‘butterfly effect’,” said Chang Yuan-hsiang, a political science professor at Soochow University in Taipei.
