| The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) may have returned to power, with the boon of holding a legislative majority, but after just more than a month, policy implementation has been problematic and personnel appointments have been anything but smooth. As a result, President Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) approval rating has dropped sharply.
The main reason for this — apart from rising oil and electricity prices and the stock market going into a freefall rather than rising above 10,000 points — is that the government has not been able to present any substantial policy achievements. In addition, Ma still has not begun to deliver on the promises he made during his election campaign.
A few days ago, the Democratic Progressive Party's last presidential candidate, Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), criticized Ma for not delivering on his promises and said this made it feel as if he had never really competed against Ma.
Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC) Minister Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) said in public a few days ago that the possibility that Ma would be able to deliver on his election promises was very high — 98 percent.
The RDEC says it has submitted Ma's 414 election promises to the respective ministries for feasibility studies. Jiang said the ministries have reacted positively to about 90 percent of the promises and that the RDEC thinks these will be 「more or less」 delivered on, while the responses to the remaining 10 percent are unclear and show some discrepancies with the original promises.
Jiang also said the RDEC was discussing these discrepancies with the respective ministries.
The question that should be asked is why there is such a huge discrepancy between the RDEC's confidence in Ma's delivering on his promises on the one hand, and the government's actual achievements and the general public's impression on the other.
The RDEC's quantification of the likelihood that Ma's election promises will be implemented, based on the ministries' 「concrete」 responses to Ma's 「concrete」 promises, is a very insubstantial approach.
Many election promises are indeed very concrete, precisely because they are election promises. The responses from the ministries, however, are only preliminary. They may not have had the time to draw up concrete implementation plans, so the question of how many promises will actually be implemented remains unanswered.
「More or less」 is very imprecise wording and may even be irresponsible. Even if implementation goes no further than to preparatory paperwork, it can still be said to have been 「delivered on.」
「More or less」 delivering on an election promise just isn't good enough and means nothing.
Chiu Hei-yuan is a professor at Leiden University.
Translated by Perry Svensson | 