TAIPEI -- "The KMT is still the biggest opposition party in the legislature." With these words, Kuomintang party chairman Lien Chan tried, unconvincingly, to put a positive spin on the former ruling party's disastrous showing in last weekend's legislative elections in Taiwan.
Lien, who already had the distinction of being the first KMT presidential candidate ever to lose that race -- finishing an embarrassing third behind President Chen Shui-bian and KMT renegade James Soong during the 2000 presidential election -- has now presided over the unraveling of the KMT's 50-year dominance of the Legislative Yuan.
The big winner was Chen's Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, which now holds 87 seats in the 225-member legislature (up from 65), outdistancing the KMT, which dropped to a mere 68 seats (down from 123 in the 1998 legislative elections, although this number had already shrunk to about 110 due to party defections after the 2000 presidential elections).