The DPP’s Vice President Lai Ching-te, a former physician, wants to extend his party’s eight-year rule over Taiwan to a third term for the first time. His main rival, the KMT’s Hou Yu-ih, a former police inspector, has painted himself as a law and order candidate who will fix the island’s relationship with China.

Both are facing a challenge from the TPP’s Ko Wen-je, a former intensive care specialist and mayor who wants Taiwan to spend less time talking about Beijing and more time talking about local jobs.

Every day for the past month they have pounded the streets of the island’s major cities to drum up support for their parties, culminating in rallies at night that funnel tens of thousands of followers into squares chanting “Team Taiwan” in unison.

The spectacle contrasts sharply with life inside the giant country next door, where democratic sympathies and holding up blank pieces of paper can send you to jail.

Fighter jets fly low and often in Tainan to meet Chinese warplanes harassing the Taiwan Strait – a loud daily reminder of the threat over the horizon. On Thursday alone 15 Chinese planes were detected around Taiwan’s air identification zone, according to the Ministry of Defence.

The impending sense of peril was compounded on Tuesday when dozens of phones buzzed with a mistranslated alert for a Chinese missile during a press conference with Foreign Minister Joseph Wu. The threat was later clarified as a satellite launch.

“Your sacred ballot will decide not only the future of Taiwan but the fate of the world,” Lai said this week, as his voice began to crack after weeks of non-stop campaigning.

China’s President Xi Jinping has repeatedly declared that unification is inevitable and threatened to use force if necessary to achieve his goal. But Beijing would prefer to avoid using missiles. So it has spent years doing everything it can to destabilise Taiwan and push voters to move closer towards the mainland.

The Chinese government believes its best bet is with a more Beijing-friendly KMT government in charge, despite Hou ruling out unifying with the mainland this week.

In the past two months alone, Taiwanese officials have accused Beijing of pressuring Taiwanese rock bands to support unification, funding folk religious groups to undermine political stability and of hitting the country with a barrage of misinformation, including deepfakes of Lai and foreign officials.

Taiwan’s fact-checkers, previously assigned to monitoring their own presidential candidates for being loose with the truth, have become so overwhelmed by the volume of misinformation flooding into the island that they have had to triage the fake video clips that they believe could do the most damage.

In March 2022, the vice chairman of the US Armed Services Committee Rob Wittman spoke to local US TV channel WUSA9 about inflation and the rising costs of fertilisers for farmers in Virginia. By January this year that clip had been transformed into fabricated remarks about the US sending troops to Taiwan and accelerating arm sales if the DPP wins on Saturday.

The chief executive of the Taiwan Fact Check Centre Eve Chiu says the influence operations are becoming more sophisticated.

The Wittman deepfake was not aimed at embarrassing Lai but at fuelling doubt about American interference in Taiwan’s elections and the threat of greater militarisation of the island provoking a response from Beijing.

“If we don’t trust each other, there is no basis to negotiate,” says Chiu. “If there is no basis to negotiate, how can democracy be possible?”

The people of Taiwan are fiercely protective of democracy because they have only just become used to it.

The Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan, but still claims it as its own. The island was governed under a dictatorship for more than 40 years by its rival the KMT following the end of the Chinese civil war. Taiwan held its first democratic presidential elections in 1996 and voluntary voters have been turning out at rates of 70 per cent ever since.

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That transition from dictatorship to democracy in a relatively short space of time has fuelled a passionate and occasionally febrile atmosphere, dividing voters along party lines as they are told the future of their country is at stake on issues such as relations with China and rising house prices.

In Tainan, antique store owner Harry Kuo says he is fearful of reprisals from other voters if he criticises the ruling DPP and Lai, who spent 20 years as the local legislator in his district before becoming vice president.

“The polarisation in Taiwan has gotten even worse since 2016. It moved from the physical world to the online world,” he says.

KMT supporters accuse DPP supporters of corruption, DPP supporters accuse KMT supporters of being puppets for Beijing. Both of them attack the TPP for sitting on the fence. Sometimes they yell abuse at each other in the street. There is little room for compromise or negotiation.

“There’s a pathway to learn what democracy really is,” says Kuo. “This is part of the process.”

Taiwan’s relations with China have drawn the focus of the world, but in Taiwan, the performance of the local economy has become the dominant concern of most voters.

“I’m worried about the low salaries of young people,” says 60-year-old Huang Schu-ching, who sells oranges and coconut from her fruit stall in the middle of a Tainan intersection as a fighter jet passes overhead.

“They won’t be able to buy a house because the price is too high.”

The KMT, once Beijing’s implacable foe, has softened its stance, and has seized upon these anxieties in a classic centre-right campaign strategy focussed on economic management and national security. At the same time, it’s framing the DPP, which has governed for most of the past decade, as elite and out of touch.

“There’s job insecurity, there’s inflation. The economy is hitting ordinary people,” says KMT magistrate Chang Li-shan who leads the party in Yunlin, a regional county between the capital Taipei in the north and Tainan in the south.

“We want to make policies to help working communities.”

Part of that vision is for closer ties with China. Hou on Friday accused the DPP of taking Taiwan to the “brink of war” as he outlined his plan to avoid conflict with China. The Chinese government cut off all official contact with Taiwan when the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen first won the presidency in 2016 in a campaign that was driven by resisting China’s growing influence.

“For the past eight years the DPP has been selling this idea that Taiwan is dying because of the threats coming from Beijing,” Chang says.

“But we should be establishing more collaboration with mainland China so that they [young people] can prosper and gain more international opportunities.”

Some voters say the DPP’s brand of hostility with China and the KMT’s appeasement of Beijing are putting them off. For the first time since Taiwan became a democracy, a third force – the TPP – stands a meaningful chance of impacting the presidential and legislative elections on Saturday.

Like the teal movement in Australia, they have successfully targeted disenchanted voters from both the left and the right.

“President Tsai Ing-wen secured 8.1 million in the last election,” says Professor Chung Chi-hui, a mass communication expert at Shih Hsin University. “Lai is predicted to only be receiving 5.8 million votes. That’s a decline of 2.7 million voters. The voters that are going away to the TPP are aged between 20-49.”

Tsai rode a wave of personal popularity and fear after Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong in 2020 to secure another term, but that panic has now subsided, leaving swing voters looking for alternatives focussed on domestic economic priorities.

“You can’t always, every day be talking about cross-strait relations,” the secretary-general of the TPP Chou Tai-chu says in an interview in the party’s headquarters in New Taipei.

“China is the biggest threat of Taiwan. This is not a secret. It has been a threat for more than seven decades.”

Chou says Taiwan’s GDP has grown by 120 per cent since 2000.

“You know the salary increase? Four per cent. It’s ridiculous,” he says.

“The impression people get in places like Australia is that Taiwan is doing very well because of IT and semiconductors. But the fruits of our achievements are not being shared. It will take a young Taiwanese 50 years to buy their own apartment in Taipei. This is a total failure of the central government.”

The TPP’s growing support has fuelled suggestions it could be a significant political force by the next presidential election in 2028.

Chou, a career diplomat, says the party is ready now. “The results are going to give you a shock.”

Despite Chou’s optimism, the man most likely to become president remains Lai. The vice president once favoured formal independence from China but now maintains he will continue to the status quo policy of the Tsai government to avoid a military confrontation.

Lai is set to face an unprecedented test in the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s lower house, where analysts expect a minority government because of the influence of the TPP. For the first time, Lai could be forced to govern without the support of the legislature – further dividing an already fractured society.

Diplomats in Taipei who were not authorised to speak publicly to discuss sensitive issues said they were preparing for a forceful response from Beijing to a DPP victory.

A KMT win would rewrite the geopolitical rule book, potentially opening the first formal communication channels between China and Taiwan after almost a decade of military threats and diplomatic silence.

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