(The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

WU: We, in Taiwan, have never seen anything like this. After just 15 months in office, more than a quarter of the elected legislators now face a recall vote. This referendum is known as The Great Recall. It's going to impact 24 legislators so far. They all belong to the KMT, the Nationalist Party. Dr. Batto, are you surprised by any of this? 

BATTO: This is new. It's unique. Recall elections are not common around the world, but I'm not surprised in the sense that they changed the law 10 years ago and made recalls a lot easier. So, one reason we haven't had a lot of recalls in the past is that they were a lot harder. 

Since they changed the law, we've had several individual recalls, but we never had divided government before, and we never had a chance to fundamentally alter the balance of power before. So everything is lined up this year to make the recall feasible in a way that it never was before. And then you had events that lit the flame, and set everything in motion.

WU: Can you walk us through. At the bottom of 2016, why was the referendum law on recalls lowered? 

BATTO: It used to be that to pass a recall, you had to have 50% turnout. If you were facing a recall, you would just tell your voters, your supporters, don't go vote. If you think about a normal general election that has about 70% turnout, and you need to get 50% to say yes to a recall. That's like getting more than 60% in a normal general election. It's an enormous threshold in a district that originally voted for the other guy, right? So they would just ignore it, and all the recalls would fail. 

What happened in 2014 after the Sunflower Movement was that, the Sunflower activists tried to recall several KMT legislators. And of course, they all failed because the recall threshold was so high, as recall thresholds are around the world.

Recalls are supposed to be difficult, but they thought that was too high and unreasonable. They thought they should have been able to recall those legislators. And so, after the 2016 election, one of the things the New Power Party pushed very hard was to change the recall and the referendum law, so that instead of needing 50% turnout, you need 25% yes votes. So 25% of the full electorate. So they said, well, it'll be like 50% turnout, but only if both sides come out and vote. So that made it much, much easier. 

And actually, if you think about a general election where you have 70% turnout, well, it usually takes about 35% of the electorate to elect somebody in the first place. Now it's taking 25% to recall them. The threshold is lower for the recall than it is to get elected in the first place. So, it's an impossibly high threshold to a very, very low and easily obtainable threshold. And that makes recalls much, much more attractive as an option. But it stems from the Sunflower Movement. 

And ironically, one of the people pushing it was Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), who is now the chair of the TPP, who are opposing the recalls.

WU: Since 2015, there's only been eight recalls staged in Taiwan. All but three have failed: One mayor, one legislature, and one city councillor. Let's talk about what motivated the organizers for this particular recall, for the great recall of 2025.

BATTO: The two big sides have very different interpretations of what happened. If you are on the KMT side, what happened is that the DPP lost the election, they lost the legislature, and the KMT and TPP coalition started changing things - as is their right - because they have the majority in the legislature. And they did things that the DPP government didn't like, predictably, because that's the way politics works. And they pushed them through using all kinds of tough tactics - because that's the way legislatures work. And the DPP government couldn't stand losing. And so they couldn't win inside the legislature, so they tried to win outside the legislature and mobilized their supporters to go out on the street and protest. It's very much a cynical power play.

And the KMT said, well, we've seen this before. This is what happened the last time that the DPP didn't have the majority. They mobilized people to go out on the streets and the Sunflower Movement, they used protesters to overturn the elected representatives and to stop the elected government from doing the things it was elected to do. We're not gonna let that happen again. So they interpret this as a cynical power play where the DPP was simply mobilizing its supporters to go out on the street and do what they couldn't do inside the legislature. 

When the people out on the street started talking about recalls, the KMT said: Well, if you're going to do this power play with recalls, we can recall you too. You're going to play us a cynical game? We can play a cynical game. And the KMT’s approach to recalls, as I guess we'll probably talk about more, has been very cynical; getting lists and organizing their supporters in a very traditional manner. And so the KMT sees this all, very much cynical power politics.

It's a very different story from the other side. On the other side, it’s tempting to talk about the DPP, but I don't really think we should start with the DPP. We should probably start with social activists, or not even social activists, just people who saw the KMT-TPP coalition in the legislature last May and last June, ramming through a bill to expand the legislature's power in ways that violated norms of how the legislature should operate. They cut off all kinds of discussion. They went and occupied the podium unilaterally, they voted by raising hands, by using the video board so that you don't have a record of who voted how. And they didn't actually count the votes. They said, raise your hand. Ok, that looks like 58 to me. 

It was all very crude. And eventually the law was overturned by the Constitutional Court as going too far. But at that point, you had a lot of people going out in the streets to protest. If you asked them, they were not cynically mobilized by the DPP. They did it themselves.

And over the next few months, they started thinking about, can we recall these legislators? It's feasible. The law makes that an option. And they're doing a terrible job. They're violating all kinds of norms of behavior and going too far, playing too close with China and doing a terrible job. We have a responsibility to try to do this.

So they would say they started the recalls on their own. And eventually when the DPP saw what was happening, the party jumped on board, because if there's a movement happening, better get on board and lead it, or you're left behind. But they see the DPP as a decidedly, secondary actor and maybe a cooperative partner, but not the leader of this. They see this as a social movement. They see themselves as social activists and they're the ones who led the recall movement, not the party. So you have two very different stories about what's happened here and why we're in this recall movement.

WU: The KMT-TPP coalition has also immobilized the Constitutional Court. They have cut budgets, especially in defense, in foreign affairs, in culture, public broadcasting and so on, to a point it angered a lot of the public. But of the 24 lawmakers to be voted on, to be recalled, only about a third of them are the loudest. So how do we understand this 24 as a batch? 

BATTO: Well, the original organizers were based heavily in the cities, especially in Taipei. And then when the DPP got on board, they made sure that all KMT legislators got targeted except for the indigenous, the four indigenous legislators. 

And you can only recall district legislators. You can't recall party list legislators. 

WU: So that would be 35 of the 39.

BATTO: 35 people were originally targeted. That's everyone. And eight of those failed at the petition stage. They tried everywhere, but they weren't able to collect signatures for even the first stage signatures, which is 1% of the electorate in places like Kinmen (金門) and Matsu (馬祖).  

And then they failed at the second stage where you need 10% signatures in places like the Changhua (彰化) Third District. The commonalities of those places where they failed is that the DPP doesn't have much support in most of those places. They're heavily blue places, but they got positions in a lot of blue places. 

The other common thread was they're very rural. And one of the things we learned in this petition drive is that it's a lot easier to collect signatures in urban places than in rural places, because you can go out in front of an MRT station and set up a booth and ask hundreds and hundreds of passerbys if they want to sign a petition. And that's a lot harder to do in a rural area. 

In the city, you're anonymous. Whereas in a rural area, if you're signing a petition, people know about it. And when you're signing a petition to recall somebody, you are directly threatening their political career. You're actually threatening people's careers and your friends know about it. You're threatening their ideals and their desires. And there are more social costs in rural areas than in urban areas. So, the 24 people are heavily urban and generally not in deep blue rural districts. So the ones in Miaoli (苗栗) failed.

Now there were some deep blue rural districts that passed, like in Hualien, where the legislator was particularly controversial. Fu Kun-chi (傅崐萁) is perhaps the most controversial of all. So it wasn't impossible, but those were the trends that explain why it was harder for some than others to pass the petition stage. 

And of course, all the petitions against the DPP legislators failed because of a different set of reasons, right? They failed because the KMT didn't take the petitions seriously. They tried to do it on the cheap, with old lists of people who had supported them in the past that weren't up to date, and didn't ask people if you were still alive. And they signed their names for them, and got into all kinds of problems for that. And then they didn't have the activists, too.

When they tried to do petition drives, the drives against the KMT legislators, every single one of those has a hundred or more activists who have put their lives on hold for a couple of months. They're spending several hours a day or - You see stories about people who actually quit their jobs to do this. The KMT is trying to do this with party workers, and they don't have that many party workers in every district.

And so all of the KMT efforts to recall DPP legislators failed just out of manpower, energy, and passion, or lack of anger or whatever you want to call it. But we've learned a lot about what it takes to put somebody on the ballot. And it's not an easy process. 

WU: So I live in Taipei. In your statistics, I should see a lot of recall activities organizing, which I have, around me. I knew somebody who had spent her entire Lunar New Year in January helping to organize. And this is the very beginning of the organizing for the recall movements. Starting with one district, then it's knowledge sharing with another district that they know is working on another recall bid.  

In Taipei, we've seen volunteers out on the streets every weekend. Online, we've seen quite an incredible series of many films. About a hundred filmmakers have banded together to create short films for public awareness, music videos, commercials. And there's one that's baseball - of course, it’s Taiwan, so you've got to have baseball themed. Multiple of them have passed a million views. You do feel it’s occupied a lot of people's attention the last six months.

BATTO: Yeah, I think so. Which district do you live in?

WU: I'm in Zhongshan (中山).

BATTO: Zhongshan (中山), yeah. And so Wang Hung-wei (王鴻薇) is a quite controversial legislator. 

And in particular she has aroused a lot of passion against her. She's in one of those districts that is not as deep blue as people think it is. It's one of the districts that's never changed hands. It's always been KMT somehow, but it seems like it shouldn't have been. And at some point, that district seems like it should have changed hands, but it hasn't. But yeah, most legislators are more anonymous. 

So I live in Xizhi (汐止) in New Taipei 12, where the legislator is a first-term person who most people don't know even here, Liao Hsien-hsiang (廖先翔). And we see quite a few people out on the street too.

In the petition drive, they sent me literature about when and where to go. I counted 29 separate events where they were holding petition drives. So much work went into this. You know, this is not quite as urban and not quite as controversial as in Taipei City, but it's clear there's a lot more energy on the recall side than on the other side, the anti-recall side.

WU: Do you have predictions on how the voter turnout could be?

BATTO: Well, we saw a few surveys last week from Mirror Media, in which the surveys had some flaws. They were all landlines, not that many cases in each district, but they did 11 districts in Taipei and New Taipei City. And the total sample size is over 3,000. So when you ask that many people, you're going to get some general trends that maybe don't translate to each individual district, but they're all correlated, so they all matter. 

One of the things we saw in that was that, the people who say they're definitely going to vote are much, much more supportive of the recall than people who say, 'yeah might vote, might not'. And if they ask you, 'are you going to vote?' And you say, 'maybe, maybe not'. What you're saying is, 'I don't care that much. I don't really care if the person is recalled or not. I guess if you ask me to vote, I'd vote against it. But I've got other things to do.' Whereas the people who are for the recall are highly motivated to turn out to vote. 

I think what we learned from those surveys is also that, the turnout rate will probably be high enough to pass the threshold. Not obviously everywhere, but in most cases, it will probably be high enough that there will be enough yes votes to pass. And it's up to the KMT legislators to mobilize their supporters to defend their seats.

We've never been through a big recall event like this. So we don't really know how turnout will unfold. It probably won't be like a general election, in which you had turnout that was driven by the presidential candidates. Well, there are no presidential candidates on the ballot this time. And most importantly, Ko-Wen-Je (柯文哲) is not on the ballot. 

So all of those people who came out to vote for Ko-Wen-Je (柯文哲) and don’t really like the KMT stay home and say, it's not my fight. I don't really care. You know the TPP is telling them to turn out to vote, but it's Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) who is not as charismatic as Ko Wen-je (柯文哲).

So, we don't know how this will unfold, but it probably will not be as favorable as an electorate towards the KMT as it was in 2024. That said, these are all blue-leaning districts. They're all KMT incumbents. So, it could go the other way too.

WU: So Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) is not on the ballot. He is still detained. His legislature seats of eight seats were all elected by the party votes. So they're not up for being recalled. KMT, more than half of the KMT legislators are on this ballot. None of the DPPs. This is so far because they're still pending petitions that are yet to be approved.

BATTO: Right. [There’s] still seven.

WU: What do you see as the role of, or the factor of, the CCP the Chinese Communist Party? A lot of the accusations against the KMT legislatures who have slashed defense budgets, for example, the accusations are that they are at the behest of the CCP. You also see there's been news from Chinese state media backing the KMT's position. So they are part of this. 

A lot of the reasons to support the recall, it's that, by removing the KMT legislators, one removes the threat from CCP. In the latest My-Formosa poll from June, respondents say that “Voting to remove legislators would mean...”, one option was “...Taiwan will be stronger against Chinese Communist Party”; The other option was “...This would affect the opposition's ability to be a government watchdog.” It's about a third and a third. What do you see as the role and the influence and impact of CCP in this recall?

BATTO: I'm always hesitant to comment on the role of the CCP in Taiwan elections, because we don't have hard data by design, right? The CCP doesn't publish data on its activities in Taiwan. But I don't have any kind of hard factual basis. We have to go on impressions, and that moves into a kind of mushy territory for me. That's the kind of thing that uh TV pundits specialize in.

So with that caveat, it's clear that the activists see a connection with the KMT and the CCP. They repeatedly point to Fu Kun-chi (傅崐萁) taking a delegation to China and then coming back and passing sets of laws that didn't have much popular support here, and did exactly what the CCP wanted. 

It’s very clear that they are motivated by that. It's also very clear from KMT rhetoric that this makes them sick. They've been accused their whole lives of being red sympathizers, or - not their whole lives, but the last, the whole democratic era - of being, you know, allies of the CCP. And they're sick of this and it makes them just turn off. If you are a strong KMT supporter, that's just, that's what they call us. 

And I can understand that. I grew up in the United States as a Democrat and Republican. During the Cold War accused Democrats of being soft on communists: “they're doing exactly what the Communist Party of the Soviet Union wants”. And we said, “no, we're not. We're seeking peace.” So I can understand why KMT supporters hear this and they say, “you're trying to paint us red and it's unfair and we're not red.” 

But their actions have convinced large parts of the population that whether the KMT supporters will admit it to themselves or not, the KMT is doing things that the CCP wants them to do, and that work in the CCP's advantage. 

I think, during this recall, one of the interesting things is that you don't have to choose between the KMT and the DPP. You can just vote on whether or not to keep this particular legislator. So you can say, “I want a KMT person. I don't want a DPP person. But this KMT person is too far towards the CCP. I think maybe we could do better than, you know, Wang Hung-wei (王鴻薇) or Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) or Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強)… or whoever it is.” 

And so one of the interesting dynamics of the recall is that it's not a general election, is that it's not a choice between this party or that party. It's just an up or down on this legislator, and whether this legislator has been behaving appropriately. 

And I think the China factor is definitely one of those really powerful influences for, at least for a certain segment of the population, both within the side of the population that normally sympathizes with the DPP and the side of the population that normally sympathizes with the KMT. I think that the China factor has been probably powerful influence for both of them in different ways.

WU: The other major factor is the domestic economy. So, the elections would need 25% of eligible voters within a constituency. And if it passes, then that district must hold a by-election within three months. So then that's another race. And if KMT was to lose six seats, then DPP would have that majority in the legislature.

BATTO: Right.

WU: Have you seen impacts already?

BATTO: A few colleagues of mine and I are looking at speeches in the legislature, and whether KMT legislators facing recalls have toned down their rhetoric in the face of the recalls. Because, last year, nobody took this seriously. Somewhere around February or March, it started hitting KMT legislators that this was real. And they needed to take some steps to try to head it off.

One of the things we're looking at is whether they started behaving more politely, more civilly, less angrily in the legislature. The other thing is that, last year there was a whole raft of controversial legislation because the next general election was, you know, two years away, three years away for the national election.

But now, in the last six months, in this term, the KMT hasn't really pushed through anything really controversial. They've toned it [way] down because they're facing voters very soon. 

After this recall process is finished, and the by-elections are finished, we will be coming up on the next general elections for the local, for the mayors and city councilors. We'll be in election cycle again. And then after that, we're in the next presidential legislative election.

Basically, they've cut a year out of normal times, when you can push through whatever you like because the voters will forget about it. They've cut a year off that, and we're in the election psychology right now, in a way we wouldn't have been without the recall movement. So yeah, I think it has changed behavior in the legislature and among KMT legislators, in noticeable ways.

But the other question is, if that happens, will the new people behave differently, or will they be just, you know... same old, same old? Because it's the same voters. Kind of bad behavior in the legislature, is a negative rather than a positive?

I just wrote a book on legislative brawls ("Making Punches Count", Oxford University Press, 2024. We argued very strongly that there was a reputational cost. People asked us, “did voters really need that?”. This is the cleanest test we will ever have.

It's not a perfect test, but it's kind of a test because part of what they're voting on is... the way the KMT passed all those bills, by going up and occupying the podium, and making sure that discussion wouldn't happen, and voting by raising hands. Part of what they're voting on is that.

And if there is a new set of KMT legislators, will they continue to do those types of things? Or will they behave differently? Or be more wary of contact with China? Or will they think that they're still KMT and the DPP had a cynical power play that worked? But that’s this year. Next year is a different year.

WU: I think as a voter that is what I fear - that we've been campaigning. We came off of campaigning, elected a new class of legislators, and then all of a sudden we're in campaigning mode again for the recall. When when campaigning for by-elections is over, [we] now campaign for the 2026 local mayor and city councilor elections. 

But the other thing is that because we weren't in perpetual campaign mode last year, the KMT-TPP coalition, they felt free to do all that controversial stuff that set off this whole recall movement. What kind of precedence does this set for the future?

BATTO: I've been asking myself that. Because one of the things that happened right before… I think they promulgated the law in January, that in the future, recall signatures will be needed. You'll need to provide a photocopy of your ID card, which will make signatures much, much more cumbersome. 

And, if it was difficult this time, and you needed a hundred or two hundred volunteers to get it all done, you're going to need twice as many to deal with all that paperwork. It's gonna be harder. So part of me thinks that this is unique, it's a one-time shot. Unless everything lines up perfectly again, we'll never see another great recall movement. 

But, the other part of me thinks if this actually works, and - you know - 15 or 20 legislators are recalled, and 10 seats change parties [into] a DPP majority... It doesn't matter how cumbersome this is, this is an option that political parties will consider in the future. So, I think, recalls might become a part of the environment, the ecology of Taiwan elections, or they might not. It depends entirely, or heavily, on how successful this is. 

As a political scientist, we talk a lot about... one of the pathologies of presidential government arguably is divided government, which leads to gridlock and sometimes democratic breakdown, when the legislature and the executive are at loggerheads and fighting against each other. We saw almost that happen in South Korea. So one of the reasons for this is fixed terms. In Taiwan's case it's four years, and you have to wait four years.

Well, the recalls can kind of unfix those fixed terms. This is a way to undo the logjam of a divided government. I mean, it can work the other way too. There's no reason that a unified government where you have the same party in power in the presidency and in the legislature, if it were very, very unpopular, you couldn't use a massive re-campaign. So this could have all kinds of unexpected consequences.

WU: While recalls are not terribly unique to Taiwan, but are really rare. In the world, only about two dozen countries have similar laws. So this includes some parts of Switzerland, some parts of Germany, two provinces of Canada, and then now the UK and some parts of the US, and then a lot of, kind of, semi-democratic countries. F

inal thoughts, as a political scientist, what is at stake for the democratic system? Could it ultimately change the way that democracies function?

BATTO: It could, but it probably won't because… 

WU: That's good to hear.

BATTO: Well… it's good or bad, I'm not sure. For one thing, the recall process in Taiwan is too easy. It's too low of a bar. It should be difficult to recall someone. It should be harder to recall them than to elect them in the first place. [Between elections] we temporarily settle our political differences and set it aside until the next election, and be able to just govern normally. But, the recalls make that a continual process. 

And that can be good or it can be bad. I think if the recall bar is too low, then you get into this perpetual election cycle too easily. If it's too high, then you just have no way out. So I personally would like to see a higher bar for recall. I think it’s too easy now. But if you have a really, really powerful shift in public opinion, then I think it helps to have an option to satisfy that shift in public opinion. 

So I don't think that it's necessarily good or bad. And I don't think that the rest of the world is going to adopt or go crazy about recalls. For one thing, if you think about the United States, the United States has elections every two years. If we had an election here, in January, we wouldn't be doing this recall now. We'd be preparing for that election. There'd be no need to have a recall six months before the next general election.

So if you have true midterm elections, then you don't need recalls quite as much as you would here. So, I don't think the rest of the world is gonna jump on this, for the simple reasons that A, they're not going to make the law so easy for recalls. And B, there are generally midterm elections in most countries with presidential systems.

So, I think we might be having a unique experience that will be interesting for the rest of the world to watch, but I don't think it will become a model.

WU: Thank you so much for today, Dr. Batto. The 24 recall referendums will take place throughout Taiwan on July 26, 2025. For districts that satisfy the thresholds, by-elections will take place later this fall. And then, Taiwan looks forward to local elections of 2026. 

Do check out Dr. Batto's work at the Academia Sinica at the Institute of Political Science, but also on your website, Frozen Garlic.

BATTO: Thank you. Thank you for the plug.