This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 23rd,

2024. I'm Caleb Brown. What do elections in Taiwan tell us about that

country's willingness to arm up against China's desire to absorb Taiwan entirely.

Cato's Eric Gomez comments.

Eric, we spoke recently about Taiwan's best friend, which is dysfunction in China's military.

How much did the potential for Taiwan to arm up to protect itself from some sort of

invasion or attack or occupation from China,

from China, how prominently

did that figure in these elections?

It's hard to tell, but like most elections,

including elections in the United States, foreign policy is always one of many concerns, with domestic usually being more so.

And I think that was the case here. more so in this election there were three players.

In this election there were three players.

Democratic Progressive Party, DPP, they're the incumbents.

They've been in power at the President level

for eight consecutive years.

There's the Quoementang or the KMT,

the main sort of opposition party to them and there's this new party the Taiwan

People's Party the TPP and I think it's best to view this election as a referendum on eight years of the DPP running the show, right?

And in that there's a whole lot of domestic concerns.

There were some scandals with DPP high-ranking politicians in the lead up to this thing,

to the election.

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