The Great Recall Movement

In Taiwan, this Lunar New Year was marked by an extraordinary sight: across the island, citizens sacrificed time traditionally reserved for family reunion, fanning out into the streets to collect signatures for a nationwide “Great Recall Movement.” Confronted with lawmakers they themselves elected just eighteen months ago, Taiwanese citizens have creatively repurposed this antiquated mechanism as a last-resort check on a runaway legislature that has paralyzed other constitutional bodies and weakened Taiwan’s defense capabilities – a profound act of self-redemption for Taiwan’s constitutional democracy.

These efforts have culminated in two decisive rounds of recall voting against 31 district legislators from the majority party – 24 slated for July 26 and 7 for August 23 – potentially unseating more than a quarter of the 113-seat legislature and barring them from running again in their constituencies for the next four years. Sparked by a year of legislative overreach and erosion of constitutional checks, this unprecedented recall campaign reflects citizens’ determination to restore the balance of power and defend Taiwan’s democratic institutions.

Taiwan’s democratic identity

Recall is the rarest instrument of direct democracy, empowering voters to remove and replace elected officials before their terms expire. Globally, only about two dozen countries have introduced it into their constitutional systems, with several restricting it to the subnational level. In Taiwan, the recall process unfolds in three stages, each governed by strict procedural and verification requirements. The first stage requires a petition signed by at least one percent of the eligible electorate, followed by a second-stage petition meeting a higher threshold of 10 percent. To succeed, the final recall vote must not only secure more votes in favor than against but also surpass one-quarter of the district’s eligible voters.

The possibility of recall elections stands in the broader context of Taiwan’s constitutional culture. Achieving constitutional self-rule through direct civic participation has long defined Taiwan’s democratic identity. Inspired by the Progressive movement in the United States in the early twentieth century, the 1947 Constitution of the Republic of China not only introduced mechanisms such as referendums and recall elections, but also enshrined them as fundamental rights – a rarity in constitutional design, even today.

Following Taiwan’s democratization, these rights have been gradually realized through successive legal amendments. Taiwan’s democratic transition and subsequent constitutional reforms have steadily expanded the scope of political participation: first through the direct election of the national legislature and the president, and later by transferring constitutional amendment powers from the now-abolished National Assembly directly to the people.

Beyond these formal channels, and particularly given how China’s aggression has narrowed Taiwan’s margin for democratic “trial and error,” collective action to correct a wayward representative government in time has become an entrenched feature of Taiwan’s constitutional culture. The 2014 Sunflower Movement stands as a prime example. Echoing the Wild Lily student movement of the 1990s, which catalyzed democratization, the Sunflower protesters successfully blocked the government’s hasty attempt to pass a service trade agreement with China and, in doing so, redefined Taiwan’s national identity.

In this sense, the ongoing mass recall campaign – born of civic concern over the legislative majority’s erosion of democratic institutions and defense capabilities – carries forward Taiwan’s century-long pursuit of democracy through collective mobilization and participation.

When power runs amok

The lawmakers currently facing recall all belong to the Kuomintang (KMT), the largest party in the legislature. By contrast, every KMT-backed counter-recall effort targeting members of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has so far fallen short.

The backdrop to Taiwan’s sweeping recall movement has been a year of legislative overreach and the gradual erosion of constitutional checks. In 2024, Taiwan returned to a divided government: the KMT, despite losing its third consecutive presidential race since 2016, regained its position as the largest party in the legislature. Backed by the smaller Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), the KMT secured a majority over the ruling DPP.

Voters had hoped this new balance of power would foster dialogue and compromise. Yet the majority’s first move was an aggressive assertion of power, expanding its substantive authority and at the same time setting the tone for a year of procedural abuses: keeping final bill texts “secret” until the last moment and forcing them through without meaningful debate. These actions sparked last May’s “Bluebird Movement,” when over 100,000 citizens took to the streets to protest the amendments and decried the process as a betrayal of the constitutional spirit: “No discussion, no democracy.”

In response to widespread public outcry, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court stepped in to strike down the contested laws. It first condemned procedural flaws in the legislative process, then turned to the substance of the legislature’s expanded powers. From investigative and interpellation authority to hearing powers, the Court held that many of the amendments infringed on individual rights and encroached excessively on the constitutional authority of the President, the Executive Yuan, and the Control Yuan, thereby violating the principle of separation of powers.

Under Taiwan’s divided government, the Court remains one of the few effective mechanisms capable of checking legislative overreach. This is because, as the above-mentioned legislative episode demonstrates, once the legislature loses its spirit of deliberation, the executive’s veto power provides little meaningful restraint. Under Taiwan’s Constitution, a veto can be overridden by a simple majority of all legislators – a threshold easily achieved by a party that already commands the legislature. Nor does Taiwan’s Constitution grant the executive the power to dissolve the legislature and return the question to the voters. In this context, the Constitutional Court has become almost the sole institution capable of stopping the legislature from overstepping its constitutional bounds.

Yet the Court’s intervention soon also made it a target. Although its ruling was fully consistent with established precedents, the legislative majority consisting of the KMT and TPP denounced the Court as having been “captured” by the ruling party, the DPP. After the terms of seven justices expired on October 31 last year, partisan gridlock in the legislature has so far left the Court unable to replenish its bench, with no new nominees confirmed. Today, only eight of the fifteen justices remain. As a result, another controversial bill passed by the opposition KMT and TPP at the end of last year could not be reviewed by the Court. It raises the bar by requiring at least ten justices to deliberate on cases and nine votes to strike down a law as unconstitutional.

The Constitutional Court was thus effectively paralyzed, leaving Taiwan’s representative system with virtually no institution to block the implementation of future laws that violate constitutional principles. Consequentially, contentious legislation continued to advance unabated.

On the very day the Court-paralyzing bill was passed, the legislative majority also imposed new procedural hurdles on petitioning and collecting signatures for recall elections. Just weeks later, in this January, it pushed through the largest budget cuts in Taiwan’s history – totaling NT$207.5 billion – which crippled core government functions. Most notably, the Control Yuan, Taiwan’s highest ombudsman and a constitutional body parallel to the Legislative Yuan, saw its budget slashed by 96%. And more than 20% of the defense budget was slashed or frozen, jeopardizing key self-defense projects such as submarines, drones, and undersea cable infrastructure, all of which are critical to resisting annexation threats and have raised grave concerns over national security.

Turning recall into rescue

It is in this context that recall has emerged, arguably, as the last resort for checking an increasingly unbridled legislature. Recall serves as a safety valve, channeling the growing political tensions exacerbated by current legislative practices. By removing officials whose actions over the past year defied the public will, it also reinforces political accountability. This is one of the core functions of recall.

More importantly, however, Taiwan’s recall movement has reinvigorated this longstanding mechanism with a novel, more structural democratic aspiration: although recall votes still take place within individual constituencies and target specific elected members, voters are now making decisions that transcend parochial interests or their representative’s personal performance. Instead, they shoulder the civic responsibility of restoring the constitutional order: leveraging recalls and subsequent by-elections to reconstitute the legislature, revive its culture of deliberation, and amend the laws to reinstate the functioning of key institutions such as the Control Yuan and the Constitutional Court.

In other words, the true target of the recall is the entire legislative majority. The focus is no longer merely on individual lawmakers, but on repurposing recall as a collective vote of no confidence in legislature as a whole. It has become an act of constitutional self-rescue, leveraging direct democracy to redeem representative democracy.

The people’s constitution

The movement resonates with Taiwan’s longstanding tradition of civic constitutionalism. Building on the momentum of last May’s Bluebird Movement, civic groups launched this mass recall campaign at the end of last year in response to a string of controversial laws, including one that raised the quorum of the Constitutional Court. The movement then spread like wildfire across the island after the sweeping budget cuts in January.

While the major parties have either backed the recall campaign or launched counter-efforts, their involvement has not stifled the movement’s autonomy. The current recall efforts are largely led by “political novices” in their 30s, who have built a robust network of mutual support – sharing personnel, experience, and resources across groups.

Throughout this year, both mobilization and counter-mobilization have been driven by a normative appeal to safeguarding Taiwan’s democracy. They are now poised to reshape the legislature’s composition and rebalance constitutional powers. This dynamic vividly embodies the essence of civic constitutionalism: through bottom-up mobilization, citizens actively shape the constitutional order and carry forward constitutional ideals.

After nearly half a century of authoritarian rule ending in 1992, and still facing the external threat, the secret to Taiwan’s democratic resilience lies in its citizens’ profound aspiration to achieve and uphold their constitutional ideals. Today, Taiwan’s constitutional order stands once again at a crossroads. Its path will turn on the sovereign voice the Taiwanese people raise through the Great Recall Movement.