Some people's hopes for change are rising. Four years ago, Taiwan held the first direct presidential election in 5,000 years of Chinese history and 400 years of Taiwanese history. Saturday, the same Taiwan electorate will hold another historic vote. Their second election will provide the highest level of voluntary exchange of office-holding ever experienced in Chinese or Taiwanese societies. Once a leader is directly elected, the drama of democratization is replaced by the routinization of political patterns.
Faces become familiar, turnout declines, high hopes diminish, and practical matters prevail.
Taiwan's second election, on the eve of voting, has become anything but routine. Turnout seems likely to remain in the 70 percent range. Some people's hopes for change are rising. In the last seven days of the campaign, defections from one camp to another, surprising endorsements by unlikely prominent figures, and a record single-day stock market decline have added unpredictability to a contest in which the three main candidates are dividing public preference into roughly equal sizes. Even a cold rain in usually balmy Kaohsiung did not deter more than 400,000 people from joining the largest political rally ever seen on the island, for Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-bian.