ABSTRACT
Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won a stunning victory in the January 2016 presidential and parliamentary elections. They exploited the mistakes of the rival Kuomintang (KMT), which bungled the selection of its presidential candidate and failed to mount a convincing defense of its performance over the previous eight years. Yet President Tsai found that governing was not so easy. She tried to maintain a balance between different priorities but faced strong resistance to some of her policy initiatives. Yet even after the defeat of the DPP in the November 2018 local elections, Tsai and her party rebounded to maintain their hold on power in 2020. Tsai and other future leaders face challenges of polarized politics in forging the domestic consensus needed to deal effectively with China.
