AIn the end, Lai Ching-te received around 16 percentage points less than outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen in the last election. And yet it was enough because the opposition took votes from each other: Lai is the next president of Taiwan. He will be inaugurated in May. The experienced politician became known for his combative speeches against Chinese claims over Taiwan. Lai comes from a wing of the Progressive Party that tends to strive for full independence for Taiwan. As recently as 2017, Lai described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan’s independence.” This not only caused anger in the People's Republic, which Lai described as “secessionists” and stopped any official channels of communication, but also caused concern in the United States at the time.
But since Lai became prime minister under the now outgoing President Tsai in 2017, he has moderated his choice of words, although not quite under control like she did: Lai said in 2023 that he hoped to one day be welcomed into the White House as president. This would require formal recognition of Taiwan as a state. During the election campaign, Lai has now promised to pursue Tsai's more cautious approach: Taiwan is already effectively independent from China, so no further formal declarations on the issue are necessary.
Lai has little foreign policy experience to date, even though he can look back on decades in Taiwanese politics, in which he held a number of important positions. While the popular Tsai sometimes seemed a bit Merkel-like aloof, Lai seems closer to the people, although his popularity ratings never came close to Tsai's.
Lai grew up in the 1960s in modest circumstances in the greater Taipei area with five siblings. His father was a miner in a coal mine and died in a mining accident when Lai was two years old. After graduating well from school, Lai studied medicine in Taipei and Tainan and later completed a master's degree in public health at Harvard in the United States.
After the ruling regime under the nationalist Kuomintang party lifted martial law in the 1980s, other parties were allowed and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was founded around human rights activists, Lai gave up his medical career and went into politics. The decisive factor in seeking higher political office were the Chinese missiles that the communist regime fired into the sea during the first free presidential election in 1996 in order to influence the result back then. Lai initially became a member of parliament in Tainan, southern Taiwan, a stronghold of the Progress Party, where he was elected mayor in 2010. From 2017 to 2019 he became Prime Minister under President Tsai Ing-wen, who was unable to run again after two terms in office.
Some say that Tsai could easily have imagined a successor other than Lai. In any case, the ambitious new president challenged the president within the party in 2020 after her first term in office, but failed in the DPP primaries. Instead, he then became Vice President of Taiwan. When he finally won the election as leader of the Progress Party in early 2023, it paved the way for him to run for president.
As president, Lai wants to strengthen Taiwan's armaments, expand relations with allied democracies such as Japan and the United States in particular, and at the same time reduce economic dependencies on China, which remains its largest trading partner. Taiwan belongs to the world, not China, he says and promises a values-based foreign policy. Since his most recent visit to America last year, he has known that there is more to it than just words.