Taiwan: William Lai, election triumphant

It begins the very tough job of governing Taiwan by the leader of the ultra-independentist wing of the Dpp William Lai Ching-te, 64, a nephrologist with a master's degree from Harvard, MP since 1999, premier from 2017 to 2019 and, until now, deputy to outgoing president Tsai ing-wen.

Flanked by number two Hsiao Bi-kim, the ticket winner with a large majority of the votes, to the Beijing nomenklatura they are just a couple of dangerous extremists.

Lai's stronghold of power, Tainan, in the south of the country where he has been mayor since 2010, has not betrayed him. Lai has been able to play his cards by tickling the traditional inclination of the southern constituencies for independence from mainland China, and he draws his most trusted ministers from there.

On 20 May, the date of his inauguration, there is no way the new president will cite the 1992 Consensus as the cornerstone of relations between Beijing and Taipei until 2016, the year of the defeat of the nationalist Kuomintang party.

Those fighting for autonomy cannot cite the One China principle reaffirmed at the end of the year by Chinese President Xi Jinping for whom reunification is a historical necessity with a date, 2049, the centenary of the birth of the People's Republic of China.