DPP Faces Most Serious Food Safety Crisis in Decade
The Storm Media Editorial, July 25, 2026
Since the carcinogenic cooking oil scandal involving excessive levels of benzo[a]pyrene erupted in early July—the most serious food safety crisis Taiwan has faced in recent years—the Lai administration’s responses to the public’s collective anxiety over health have exposed the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) most deeply rooted problem.
After years of thinking in campaign mode and instinctively responding like political attack dogs, the ruling party has lost its ability to communicate with ordinary citizens about issues affecting their daily lives.
In 2013 and 2014, Taiwan was hit by a series of major food safety scandals involving adulterated and substandard cooking oils. The administration of then-President Ma Ying-jeou was severely criticized for its handling of those incidents.
Then in 2016, Tsai Ing-wen was elected president partially due to a wave of public concern over food safety. She nominated Wu Kun-yuh, a highly respected professor of public health at National Taiwan University, as the first candidate on the DPP’s party list for legislator-at-large. Her administration loudly proclaimed its commitment to food safety and promoted its “Five-Point Food Safety Policy.”
Now, as the DPP enters its 10th year in power, it is confronting its most serious food safety crisis since taking office. The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) has investigated for nearly a month, yet it still cannot clearly explain why the oil contained excessive levels of benzo[a]pyrene. Nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), MOHW, rushed to allow the products back onto store shelves.
The FDA was fiercely criticized for failing to put public health first. Even Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai, a member of the DPP, could not help complaining: “Am I supposed to spend every day taking the products off the shelves and putting them back again?”His frustration revealed how chaotic and unreasonable the central government’s handling of the toxic oil scandal had become.
Faced with the high standards it once set for itself, the administration of President Lai Ching-te appears completely at a loss. When officials did not know how to solve the problem, they resorted to the shortcut with which they were most familiar: politicizing it. They sought to activate the fears of their core supporters and persuade them to believe unconditionally that the DPP was right. The party’s familiar aggressive election-campaign mode was instantly switched on. The clearest example came when DPP Spokesperson Wu Cheng, responding to criticism on a political talk show, angrily blurted out: “I didn’t force you to eat it. Why are you yelling at me?”
The DPP first chose to criticize the attitude of those raising questions. If you spoke loudly or challenged the government, you were labeled “emotional” or accused of engaging in “political manipulation.”
Second, the party refused to show weakness or empathy. Apologizing was treated as equivalent to surrendering ground to a political opponent, so its posture had to remain relentlessly tough.
Third, it quickly drew partisan battle lines. It reduced a food safety issue that affected people across party lines to “political attacks by certain media outlets and opposition parties,” hoping to awaken the defensive instincts of its core supporters.
The greatest irony of this “attack-dog communication” is that it not only angered centrist voters but also directly undermined the civil servants who had worked hard on the front lines to manage the crisis.
After the scandal broke, the FDA conducted laboratory tests, local health departments carried out overnight inspections and ordered products removed from store shelves, prosecutors launched an investigation and sought the detention of the business operators involved, and the Executive Yuan proposed amendments to the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation as well as heavier fines.
These concrete actions should have helped restore public confidence. Instead, they were completely overshadowed by the spokesman’s remark—“I didn’t force you to eat it”—and the party’s aggressive counterattacks.
The toxic oil scandal is like a mirror reflecting the dysfunction and shortcomings of a governing team that has held power for too long.If the DPP still cannot learn to remove its campaign armor and continues treating every public complaint and question as a political attack that must be countered, then the resentment produced by its accumulated arrogance will eventually deliver the harshest possible response to this party that appears to care only about winning elections—at the ballot box.