KMT claims victory in local elections

The KMT was jubilant yesterday after successes in local elections which, it claimed, showed that it had won back the support of the public.

In elections for local township chiefs the KMT was expected to win 226 out of the 319 positions contested, while in elections for provincial city and township councilors the former ruling party expected to gain 424 out of 879 seats.

The DPP was expected to win 28 township chief seats and 147 councilor seats.

Final figures, certified by the Central Election Commission, were unavailable at press time.

The election successes for the KMT come after a miserable two years in which the party lost the presidential election in 2000 and saw its standing in the legislature reduced from 110 seats to 68 in elections on Dec. 1 last year.

"The election results reflect up-to-date public opinion, and we believe that the political domain has been restructured," KMT Secretary-General Lin Fong-cheng (林豐正) said.

Political scholars, however, said that it was not so much the KMT's popularity which had resulted in victory so much as its well-developed voter-mobilization methods. Local council and township chief elections in Taiwan usually are dominated by local factional politics which only nominally has anything to do with national-level parties.

Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), chairman of the DPP, said "the election results showed that the DPP needed to extend its local support base."

The People First Party (PFP) was expected to come away with 4 seats in the elections for local chiefs and 49 councilor seats.

David Chung (鍾榮吉), the party's secretary-general, said that the election results were not important enough to serve as a way of evaluating support at the national level for the PFP.

"More voters support the PFP than these elections show. The PFP is a new party, and it needs more time to establish its local support base," Chung said.

The newly formed Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) failed to win any local chief posts and was expected to gain only seven councilor seats -- only half the number of legislative seats it won last month.

"Local elections don't reflect party support. These results are much more about support for particular candidates themselves," said Hsiao Kuan-yu (蕭貫譽), director of the TSU's public-relations department.

Political analysts also attributed the KMT's success to its fielding a large number of candidates in the elections.

It fielded 324 candidates for local government chief posts -- compared with the DPP's 166 -- and 637 candidates for councilor seats, compared with the DPP's 266.

There were a total of 2,939 candidates registered for the elections which are expected to be the last of their kind, since the government is expected to make local governments below the provincial level appointed positions from 2006 onward.

Police received more than 3,000 tips regarding alleged vote-buying, according to statistics from the Ministry of Justice.

Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南) said that local elections lend themselves more to vote-buying and manipulation than national-level elections.Also See Stories:

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