How the Sunflower Movement legacy lives on in Taiwan's 2024 elections

Two months prior to the tenth anniversary of the Sunflower Movement, the Taiwanese people headed to the polls. They decided to grant the governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) another presidential term of four years, but denied it the legislative majority.

The DPP's seats were reduced from 61 to 51, trailing behind the 52-seat Kuomintang (KMT) in the 113-seat Legislative Yuan. The victory of the DPP's Lai Ching-te (40.1%) over the Kuomintang's Hou Yu-ih (33.5%) and the insurgent candidate of Taiwan People's Party Ko Wen-je (26.5%) suggests the continuation of President Tsai Ing-wen's policy course in the years to come.

Since taking office in 2016, Tsai's administration has rejected the so-called 1992 Consensus (that Taiwan and the mainland belong to one China), strengthened Taiwan's defence capabilities, intensified cooperation with the democratic West, and diversified trade and civilian exchanges with the signature New Southbound Policy.

These attempts to reduce economic dependence on China and to safeguard national sovereignty can be traced back to the powerful eruption of the Sunflower Movement in March 2014, in which students and young protesters stormed and occupied the national legislature for more than three weeks to oppose the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA). After protesters peacefully terminated their massive civil disobedience, the CSSTA was left unratified, and the humiliated KMT suffered back-to-back electoral defeats in 2014 and 2016, handing power to the Tsai-led DPP.

Unexpectedly, the Sunflower legacy was put to a severe test in the 2024 election in several ways.

In June 2023, Ko Wen-je broached the idea of reinitiating the CSSTA, and he claimed to have followed the spirit of the Sunflower Movement because the latter only opposed the procedural injustice, but not the free trade agreement itself.

Ko's revisionism deviated from the fact that the Sunflower Movement was motivated by a visceral fear of loss of political freedom due to economic dependence; his sortie can be seen as a gambit to lure deep-Blue voters from Hou Yu-ih, who later followed suit to avoid being marginalised.

Perhaps, the best riposte from the DPP came from Roy Lee, a former pro-CSSTA scholar who later was appointed as deputy minister of foreign affairs. Lee likened the CSSTA to a "ten-year-old chicken steak that has gone bad" because many democratic countries were currently restructuring their supply chain to reduce their risk exposure to China.

Secondly, after the Sunflower Movement unleashed a mighty torrent of youthful enthusiasm, many of its participants went on to take part in elections or formed new political parties. The New Power Party (NPP) was perhaps the most successful among these trials.

It emerged as the third largest party in the legislature with its five lawmaker seats in 2016, and it managed to retain three seats in 2020 despite the internal strife. The idea of a movement party in the national legislature has been the dream project among Taiwan's movement activists. Shortly after the lifting of martial law in 1987, two labour-oriented parties were formed in the late 1980s, but they never succeeded in gaining a national presence.

Taiwan's Green Party was established in 1996, when the country's anti-nuclear protest wave surged. Yet despite its continuous efforts in nearly three decades, there was never a Green Party lawmaker in Taiwan. In comparison, the NPP's electoral success attested to the magnitude of the political earthquake wrought by the Sunflower Movement.

Yet the NPP stumbled in the 2024 election. None of its district candidates survived in the fierce DPP-KMT duel, and its party vote amounted to a paltry 2.57%, well below the 5% threshold that made it eligible for proportionate seat distribution. In 2016 and 2020, the NPP received 6.1% and 7.75% respectively.

The NPP was no longer able to maintain its presence in the national arena, and to add insult to injury, it was disqualified from the public subsidy for receiving less than 3% of the votes. In hindsight, the NPP's downfall was in part due to being squeezed out by the surge of Ko Wen-je's TPP, which succeeded in poaching some celebrity leaders from the NPP.

Lastly, the Sunflower Movement gave birth to a cohort of youthful activists who cut their teeth in protest movements before devoting themselves to full-time political careers. Some of these millennials used to join NPP or other startup parties, while others were recruited by the DPP.

The 2024 election represented a collective attempt of these Sunflower Movement participants to carve out their presence in the national arena. Out of 73 lawmaker districts, the DPP nominated or supported seven candidates. Although Lai Pin-yu, who used to be the youngest legislator in 2020, lost in her reelection bid, Wu Pei-yi and Huang Jie (who will be the first openly LGBT lawmaker in Taiwan) took on the mantle to continue their "long march through the institutions".

Although the majority of these ex-Sunflower Movement activists failed in the winner-takes-all district election, their performance clearly outshined the previous DPP nominees. Miao Poya (of Social Democracy Party), a fearlessly eloquent lesbian who campaigned in the deep-blue Daan district of Taipei City, was able to obtain 44.8% of the vote. Miao's final week's campaign push with a livestreamed street talk attracted tens of thousands of online viewers. Tseng Wen-hsueh (nonpartisan) campaigned in landlocked Hakka townships, but he also obtained an unprecedented 45% of the vote.

As one of the most consequential social protests in postwar Taiwan, the Sunflower Movement left behind many longstanding impacts. Since the 2024 general election is inevitably a referendum of DPP Tsai Ing-wen's eight-year administration, the verdict naturally extends to the 2014 movement.

My assessment is that the Sunflower legacy largely stayed intact in that the unprecedented three presidential wins in a row signify a strong determination to reject being locked into a China-centered political economy.

Moreover, the coming-of-age of a generation of ex-Sunflower Movement activists as professional politicians whose seemingly unbounded sources of optimism and idealism are bound to carry the nation forward to meet the next challenge. However, the dream of a viable movement party suffered an irremediable defeat with the NPP's fall from grace. In short, the Sunflower Movement stood up well to the excruciating test of the 2024 election, just that the political channel of youthful activism needed to be rerouted.

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