Ma Ying-jeou's Katrina Moment

The Wall Street Journal, AUGUST 17, 2009

Natural disasters usually cause political storms too, so it's no surprise clouds are gathering over Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou after his government's bungled response to Typhoon Morakot. Although Mr. Ma has won accolades for his earlier foreign-policy accomplishments, he is now paying a political price for domestic neglect.

Typhoon Morakot swept across Southern Taiwan earlier this month and dumped six feet of rain. Entire villages were buried alive by massive mudslides. The storm has left 500 dead or missing and hit the struggling economy with a 110 billion New Taiwan dollar ($3.3 billion) bill for recovery efforts.

Like China's Sichuan earthquake last year, Taiwan's typhoon would have caused massive destruction no matter how prepared the government was. But the Ma administration's flat-footed response aggravated the problem. The foreign ministry initially rejected nonmonetary foreign aid. The Ma administration had trouble coordinating its response, and the president even suggested at one point that local officials were to blame for not evacuating people early enough. Over the weekend he apologized for not doing a "better and faster" job.

Taipei eventually got its act together. The military has muscled 182,000 soldiers into the effort and evacuated thousands from the worst-hit areas. Mr. Ma has opened his arms to foreign aid, and now 59 countries are contributing to relief efforts. The U.S. military has even sent a helicopter.

The political damage may have only just begun. Mr. Ma's approval ratings were at 35% and falling even before the storm and most Taiwanese think he has handled it poorly. The typhoon did its worst damage in across Taiwan's agricultural south, where Mr. Ma's political opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party, has always had a strong base.

The question now is whether an enraged DPP will succeed in rallying public support against Mr. Ma's initiatives for the remainder of his term, which expires in 2012. Unlike in Sichuan, the victims of Typhoon Morakot can punish or reward their elected officials at the ballot box. An early litmus test will be December's nationwide county-level elections.

Mr. Ma still enjoys high approval ratings versus his peers in other Asian democracies. But he is learning that his job is about much more than foreign relations. If he wants to avoid his Katrina moment, Mr. Ma has to serve his domestic constituents, too.