Taiwan’s politics is at an inflection point. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has held the presidency since 2016, has been on the defensive since the attempt to recall more than thirty legislators from the main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) failed this summer. Although observers expected at least a few politicians to be recalled, voters ultimately kept all of their politicians in their seats—a major rebuke to President Lai Ching-te, who threw his support behind the recall in its waning days. The KMT, meanwhile, elected a new party chair, the brash and provocative Cheng Li-wun, whose rhetoric about restoring Chinese identity among Taiwanese has energized supporters and alienated critics who worry she is too closely aligned with Beijing.

External changes are also rattling the Taiwanese public. US President Donald Trump levied 20 percent tariffs on Taiwan in August, hurting many of the island’s domestic industries. More worryingly for the US-Taiwanese relationship are Trump’s conciliatory overtures toward Chinese leader Xi Jinping, which have raised concerns that the United States will accede to Beijing’s demands on Taiwan in exchange for a potential trade deal. These demands could include more forceful denunciations of Taiwanese independence or a willingness to deviate from the United States’ long-standing ambiguity in how it talks about the Taiwan Strait. Worsening relations with the United States have hurt Lai and the DPP, whose harder line against Beijing leaves them more reliant on the United States for support.

These changes have led many observers to speculate on the potential resurgence of the KMT, which has struggled to gain momentum for nearly a decade. If the KMT is able to revive its fortunes by gaining seats in the 2026 midterm elections and taking the presidency in 2028, it could fundamentally alter the relations in the Taiwan Strait. Chinese leaders have expressed much more willingness to work with their counterparts in Taiwan if the KMT is in charge, which could signal either more room to dial down tensions in the Taiwan Strait—what the KMT advertises—or open up new avenues for Chinese forces to exercise control and influence over the island, which the DPP fears.

The changes are real, and the KMT’s prospects look much brighter than a year ago. But the party’s resurgence faces numerous structural headwinds and deeply rooted challenges that it must overcome to regain its power as a dominant force in Taiwanese politics.

Anti-DPP Is Not Necessarily Pro-KMT

In the 2024 presidential election, Lai managed to win only 40 percent of the overall vote. Lai’s predecessor Tsai Ing-wen, meanwhile, had garnered 56 percent in 2016 and 57 percent in 2020. The DPP also lost control of the legislature: the KMT won one more seat than the DPP, while the upstart third party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), won a decisive eight seats to hold the balance of power. During the election campaign, observers frequently attributed some of the decline in support for Lai and the DPP to anti-incumbent sentiment.

Although Lai’s popularity enjoyed a brief resurgence in parts of his first year in office, his approval ratings have again plummeted since the failed recall campaign. Recent polling from the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation, which runs monthly surveys, shows a large drop in public support for the president. As recently as June, Lai’s approval ratings were above water, with 49 percent of respondents approving compared to 46 disapproving. The latest poll released in November shows Lai with only 39 percent approving, compared to more than 50 percent disapproving. Polls from Formosa Forum, another monthly pollster, show similarly weak numbers for Lai. Fewer respondents trust Lai than distrust him (42 percent to 48 percent), a sharp reversal from a year ago, when he had 56 percent trust and only 35 percent distrust.

But growing dissatisfaction with the DPP does not automatically translate into support for the KMT. In the 2024 election, the biggest surprise was the performance of third-party candidate Ko Wen-je, a charismatic but highly polarizing doctor and former mayor who ran on a platform emphasizing dissatisfaction with either of the two establishment parties. Although Ko’s TPP and the KMT were often grouped together because they were both opposition parties that sought to unseat the DPP—especially before their attempts to form a joint presidential ticket fell apart spectacularly on live television—analyses suggest that many of the TPP’s voters share more of an ideological basis with the DPP than the KMT.

Moreover, the failure of the Great Recall appears to be less of an endorsement of the KMT than a rejection of the DPP. Although postmortems of the recall campaign inevitably point to various factors, the DPP’s involvement coincided with the declining fate of the effort. Supporters of the recall originally argued that they were grassroots activists who had grown frustrated with the KMT’s obstruction in the legislature and willingness to cozy up to Beijing. Yet a month before the first recall vote, Lai and the DPP threw their weight behind the campaign. As elections scholar Nathan Batto suggests, once this occurred, the logic of the contest seemed more like a traditional partisan battle than a targeted effort to unseat a small handful of extreme legislators. Many voters thus felt that the DPP was unfairly asking them to undo their votes a year after the election, which made the DPP’s claims of acting in the name of democracy ring hollow.

But the KMT’s momentum from the recall is likely to be short-lived, as Taiwanese politics changes quickly, and voters will soon demand further evidence that they should continue to favor them over the DPP. Lai’s approval rating, which reached its nadir in September, is already recovering, and the balance of his favorability to unfavorability is trending closer together. Lai has much to do to win back support among the Taiwanese public, but pure opposition to the DPP in the wake of the recall is likely to dissipate as time goes on.

Youthful Resurgence

The KMT’s traditional base is older—and aging. According to Reuters, only 3 percent of the KMT’s 300,000 members were under 40 in 2023. Recognizing the dangers of overreliance on aging supporters, many voices within the KMT have called for improving the party’s appeal to Taiwanese youth. Efforts to attract younger candidates have already taken root. In the 2024 election, for instance, the KMT nominated thirteen candidates under the age of forty to national legislative seats, nine of whom won and are serving as new legislators.

The KMT’s optimism about its appeal to youth is also connected to a sense that the youngest generation of voters is less attached to the DPP than previous cohorts. Taiwanese citizens who came of age politically during the Sunflower Movement, which began as a youth protest against Ma Ying-jeou’s 2014 proposal for a trade deal to establish closer trade relations between Taiwan and mainland China, tend to be ardent supporters of the DPP and remain very skeptical of the KMT. Polling reflects this shift: in a recent Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation survey on attitudes toward the KMT, the cohort of twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds is consistently the most critical of the KMT, followed by those who are thirty-five to forty-four. The youngest voters, by contrast, spent their formative years knowing only DPP dominance under the presidencies of Tsai Ing-wen (2016–24) and now Lai Ching-te. They also view the KMT skeptically, but at lower rates than those a decade or two older than them.

In the 2024 election, youth flocked to Ko Wen-je and the TPP. For many KMT supporters, the struggles of the TPP in the past year since the election should create an opening for attracting some of these younger voters. In August 2024, prosecutors detained Ko on corruption and bribery charges. Although Ko’s supporters argue that his prosecution was a political witch-hunt, the ongoing scandal has dealt a blow to his reputation and forced him to step down as the head of the TPP. The TPP’s overall support dropped from a high of 25 percent around the election to the low double digits, and, while recovering, remains at only around 15 percent.

KMT politicians seeking to expand their support have talked about once again working with the TPP electorally—hoping this time to avoid an embarrassing public breakup similar to what occurred during the 2024 presidential joint ticket attempt. The two parties share a deep disdain for the DPP, which has brought them together in the legislature. Although the TPP advertises its own agenda somewhere between the two establishment parties—claiming more similarity with the DPP on national security issues and more overlap with the KMT on domestic political reforms—it has managed its differences behind the scenes and publicly voted together with the KMT in most cases.

But youth disillusionment with the DPP has not immediately translated into support for the KMT. In 2024, youth who gravitated toward the TPP were more ideologically similar to DPP voters but felt primarily motivated by a desire to reject the overall partisanship of Taiwan. Research by the political scientist Lev Nachman on youth support for the TPP shows that many of them disliked both the KMT and DPP and found themselves drawn to Ko’s rejection of both establishment parties. It is also unclear whether a nominal political alliance with the TPP will attract young voters who are, at baseline, skeptical of the KMT’s positions.

Maintaining a successful KMT-TPP alliance will also be a challenge. The two parties share some of the same space and, arguably, are competing for the same votes, as Kharis Templeton argues. The charisma of a figure like Ko that attracted young voters will not easily translate beyond his own individual candidacy, let alone through his party to the KMT, unless Ko himself endorses such an arrangement. Otherwise, both parties may end up hoping to cooperate but undercutting each other instead.

Style Versus Substance: The Cross-Strait Challenge

In October, KMT voters elected as the next party chair the fiery former legislator Cheng Li-wun, who is now responsible for setting the KMT’s policy direction and leading it into the upcoming elections. Cheng’s victory immediately set off alarm bells in many political circles: during the campaign, Cheng appealed to more conservative KMT supporters, including those sympathetic to reunification. In public speeches, she emphasized that Taiwanese citizens should proudly embrace that they are “Chinese,” rather than only Taiwanese. She further raised hackles after her election by attributing the outbreak of Russia’s war in Ukraine primarily to North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion, a position more similar to that of Beijing than of Washington or Brussels.

Cheng’s supporters claim that she is not pro-unification, and her insistence on Chinese identity is because of Taiwan’s status as the Republic of China. She argues that her position to improve relations with Beijing is aimed at reducing the likelihood of conflict through more dialogue and meetings. Her supporters see her difference as one of style rather than substance: she is more combative than typical KMT figures, but she still qualifies her more controversial statements with more traditional policy gestures in support of Taiwan. And supporters see in her emphasis on diplomacy rather than defense a position well within the bounds of Taiwanese popular opinion, which seeks ultimately to find ways to ensure peace in the Taiwan Strait.

But Taiwanese citizens seem to overwhelmingly believe that she is pro-unification, a position that represents only a marginal place in Taiwan’s political spectrum. Formosa Forum’s November poll found that 47 percent of voters believed that Cheng’s stance on cross-Strait relations leaned toward unification, far higher than any other response (30 percent were unsure). As an indication of the state of polarization in Taiwanese politics, the same percentage—47 percent—believed Lai Ching-te was pro-independence. Taiwanese citizens themselves, however, tend to favor a position in between, one they associate with neither party leader.

Regardless of the exact position, the appearance of sympathy toward reunification has reinforced one of the KMT’s biggest weaknesses among the general electorate: the perception among Taiwanese citizens that the party is too closely aligned with China. A recent Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation poll focused on the topic found that half of respondents felt that the KMT aligned itself more with China than with Taiwan. Voices within the KMT have noted young people do not like to identify with the term “Chinese” because of its perceived connection with the Chinese Communist Party, and thus there is a long way to go before it will be popular to use such terms. Others note that the KMT’s insistence on an ambiguous position on cross-Strait relations has alienated younger Taiwanese who have grown up witnessing a more assertive Beijing that has rejected democracy more fully.

Even if Cheng adheres to the KMT’s mainstream position on cross-Strait relations—something that upholds the goal of the “1992 Consensus” in which both sides can claim “one China” but differ on what that means, with some modifications to promote basic defenses—the public notion that the KMT does not have a clear and convincing position on cross-Strait relations will continue to turn away potential supporters. The KMT will likely focus on domestic issues, such as rising prices and a slowing economy, which are more salient to many voters than abstract issues of international relations.

With the possibility of conflict rising, however, the KMT will have to find a way to convince a larger share of voters that its more conciliatory strategy to promote peace is viable in the face of a more assertive attitude from Beijing. Cheng’s charismatic and assertive style won KMT votes and seems poised to inject energy into a long-dormant party, which can mobilize committed voters and revive some of the KMT’s fortunes. But the overall base may not be large enough to overtake the DPP and what is left of the TPP. The path to national resurgence requires overcoming a population that is still skeptical of whether the KMT’s idea for how to ensure peace will sufficiently protect the de facto sovereignty that the vast majority of Taiwan’s citizens want to keep.

Image credit: Supporters of Kuomintang (KMT) party attend a rally against the recall campaign ahead of Saturday’s vote for lawmakers, in Taipei, Taiwan July 25, 2025. REUTERS/Annabelle Chih