Lai, who has been vice president since 2020, said in his victory speech on Saturday that Taiwan's elections showed the world that “between democracy and tyranny, we will stand on the side of democracy.” “I want to thank the Taiwanese people for writing a new chapter in our democracy,” he said.
He received 40% of the votes compared to 33% for Hu Yu-yeh, the candidate of the opposition Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. The race became unusually close thanks to the popularity of the third candidate, Ku Wen-ji, of the smaller Taiwan People's Party, who received 26 percent of the vote.
The 64-year-old Harvard-educated former doctor, who also goes by the name William, will take office in May, extending his party's eight-year rule for an unprecedented third term.
Internationally, Lai's presidency will likely be judged by how well he manages an increasingly aggressive Beijing and whether he can avoid a major crisis in the region.
The Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan, but claims the self-governing island of 23 million people as part of its territory and regularly threatens to seize it by force if Taipei formally rules out “unification.”
Xi Jinping, China's powerful leader who promotes grand narratives about national “rejuvenation,” has dramatically escalated military activity around Taiwan in recent years and has judged unification “inevitable.”
In the campaign, Lai portrayed himself as the safe and familiar choice to fend off Hu, who has called for a compromise with Beijing to ease tensions. He has repeatedly promised to continue the approach of President Tsai Ing-wen, who will step down after fulfilling the two-term limit, underscoring how influential his predecessor was in shaping the defense and foreign policy debate in Taiwan.
Like Tsai, Lai stresses that he is open to talking with Xi but only as an equal. He has urged Beijing to rethink its pressure tactics, but says he is “under no illusions” about its intentions.
Instead of trying to please Beijing, Lai said he would focus on securing Taiwan's global standing by strengthening ties with the United States and other friendly democracies. He wants to continue military reforms, protect politics from interference, and secure the economy from coercion.
This agenda will be hampered by the Progressive Democratic Party's loss of its majority in the Legislative Council. The Kuomintang's ability to block Lai will make him appear vulnerable in the eyes of Beijing, which will use “pressure tactics” in hopes of ousting him in the next election, said Wen Thi Song, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Beijing has made its antipathy to Lai abundantly clear. Chinese officials consider him a “separatist” because of his views on Taiwan's sovereignty, and say he would bring “severe danger” to cross-Strait relations.
“The Chinese Communist Party leadership will certainly say that Lai is worse than Tsai,” said Shelley Reger, an expert on Taiwanese politics at Davidson College.
She said that China's leaders are adhering to a strategy of “perpetual escalation,” and “for them, admitting that any leader of the Democratic Progressive Party does not pose an existential threat would be tantamount to a retreat from the commitments they have made.”
China's military pressure campaign has raised fears of miscalculation that could spark conflict and draw in the United States. Analysts are watching closely to see whether Beijing will respond to Lai's victory with large-scale exercises that could lead to escalation of tensions.
Experts in Taiwanese politics fear Beijing may have long ago made up its mind about Lai, despite his efforts to distance itself from his previous call for formal independence.
Taiwan falls into something of a gray area, as it has its own government, its own passport, and its own distinct identity. But due to China's objections, it has diplomatic relations with only 13 countries and has no official seat in the United Nations or other international bodies. However, many governments, including the United States, maintain strong informal ties with Taipei.
It has enjoyed de facto sovereignty for 75 years without pushing for outright secession, which Beijing strongly opposes.
Unlike Tsai, a career bureaucrat and international trade negotiator who was viewed by many in the DPP as an outsider, Lai rose to prominence in the days when the party publicly supported formal Taiwanese independence.
“A practical worker for Taiwan independence”
Lai's political career began and took off in Tainan, the coastal city in southern Taiwan that has long been a party stronghold.
As a young lawmaker and then popular mayor of Tainan from 2010 to 2017, Lai became a leading figure in the “New Tide” faction of the party that once pushed for the inclusion of a provision on Taiwan independence in the party charter.
When he was appointed prime minister in 2017, he described himself as a “practical worker for Taiwan independence” and that he would always uphold that goal.
During the election campaign, Beijing and the main opposition Kuomintang party used his previous statements to claim that he would upend the fragile agreements between Beijing, Taipei and Washington that have kept the peace for decades.
But his supporters say these critics misread Lai's position by focusing on the “independence” part of that wording. “He was just saying that he is a very practical person and looks at cross-Strait relations in a practical way,” said Yeh Zi Shan, deputy mayor of Tainan, who worked alongside Lai for seven years there.
During the election campaign, Lai stressed that he had no plan to declare independence. He says Taiwan already has sovereignty under its official name, the Republic of China, and there is no need to formalize secession and risk Chinese invasion.
Beijing – and to a lesser extent Washington – may be concerned about Lai's early advocacy, but he is not seen as likely to cross the line among elders of the hard-line Taiwan independence movement.
Yaw Chia Win, the party's president from 1987 to 1988, said the DPP had “transformed from an organization driving political reforms into an electoral machine.” “That won't happen either,” he said.
Even if younger generations increasingly identify as Taiwanese — not Chinese — and take democratic freedoms for granted, overwhelming majorities support “maintaining the status quo” when it comes to relations with Beijing, polls show.
Some analysts worry that Lai lacks the discipline that Tsai has shown when talking about relations with Beijing.
“One of the things that has helped Tsai a lot is her very consistency,” Reger said, but Lai’s background in political campaigns makes him “more talkative” and can undermine his ability to stick to his message.
A history of difficult authoritarian regimes
Lai was born in a slum in New Taipei City, and her life began with tragedy. The youngest of five children, his father died in a mining accident when he was three months old.
After enrolling at the prestigious National Taiwan University and moving to Tainan to become a doctor, he went into an intellectual frenzy in the 1990s, a turbulent period in Taiwanese politics that those close to him say left him with a quiet determination to challenge perceived injustices.
The Kuomintang had ruled Taiwan as a one-party state for four decades after losing the Chinese Civil War to the Communists and fleeing to the island in 1949. When martial law ended in 1987, the democracy movement took off, and Lai decided he couldn't. Don't sit on the sidelines.
“The intellectuals at that time were eager to overthrow the authoritarian Kuomintang regime,” said Lu Wei-yin, a Tainan city councilor who worked with Lai in the 2000s.
Early on, Lai was idealistic and very serious about his work. Those close to his days in Tainan describe him as dignified and focused on policy details.
He almost always wore a suit and would call out his colleagues for wearing underwear. The only time he seemed truly comfortable was when he talked about his favorite — and arguably Taiwanese — sport: baseball.
Although soft-spoken, he did not shy away from fighting as a young legislator. In 2005, when the Kuomintang blocked his party's proposal that Taiwan buy more weapons from the United States, Lai was photographed hurling insults on the floor of Parliament.
“When he thinks something is wrong, he has to do something,” Lu said.
This need to protest has put Lai in an awkward position at times. In 2014, on his first trip to China, he caused a stir when he publicly defended his party's position on Taiwan independence to his Chinese hosts.
One Chinese scholar has suggested that the DPP freeze the Taiwan independence clause in the party charter to facilitate talks with Beijing — a proposal that has surfaced again in recent months by the Kuomintang and prominent American academics.
Lai responded that his party had not created a desire to secede from China, and that suspending the clause would not help Beijing resolve the fundamental reason why Taiwanese do not want to be ruled by Beijing. “Support for Taiwan independence in society comes first, then comes the Democratic Progressive Party,” he said.
Megan Tobin in Taipei, Taiwan contributed to this report.
