Having experienced the chaos following the presidential election, people in Taiwan are preparing for the legislative elections in December. Political parties from both the pan-blue and pan-green camps are striving to win a majority in the legislature and are using this goal as their campaign theme.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has said that only a pan-green majority in the legislature would allow President Chen Shui-bian's (
The appeals offered by both sides seem reasonable and normal. But the real question is this: Among these various appeals, how can voters identify the parties which actually do what they promise to, and those which only employ lofty slogans to gain power for a few?
With the legislative elections less than 100 days away, the nation's political parties are bolstering their election campaigns. It is also time for political parties to start putting on all kinds of shows to polish their image and platforms. Those who care about the legislative elections should pay attention to the lists of legislator-at-large nominations recently disclosed by the media. The lists provide a good way to assess the sincerity of the parties' promises of political reform.
The legislator-at-large nominations embody a party's image, while the hard-fought electoral districts test the party's capabilities. In other words, if a party does not care about its image and treats the legislator-at-large nominations as a mechanism to remunerate benefactors or settle internal party conflicts, then this kind of party does not deserve public support.
Judged on this basis, the KMT's legislator-at-large nominations are disappointing, because they are all KMT Chairman Lien Chan's (
As for the People First Party (PFP), its nominations are characterized by a recruitment of academics, including people such as economist Liu Yi-ju (
As for the pan-green camp, not that many of its nominees have been made public. But if they are going to push through the constitutional amendments or re-engineering that they have been proposed, both the DPP and the Taiwan Solidarity Union should nominate people with legal and administrative expertise. They must definitely avoid a recurrence of the criticism that they use legislator-at-large nominations to buy over rival politicians, bring in sponsors or remedy factional disputes.
Mainstream public opinion seems to favor political reform in the coming legislative elections. Whichever party can meet this demand is the one that will come out on top. People who are concerned about Taiwan's politics should analyse the soon-to-be released list of nominees presented by each of the parties and reject those parties that seek to win votes through pretense and deceit.
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