For all the weeks of strenuous campaigning and endless speculation, the elections in Taiwan's two biggest cities yesterday only confirmed the status quo prevailing for the past four years.
Pollsters and commentators who had predicted a seismic shift away from the accident-prone DPP were left with egg on their face.
In Taipei, the KMT incumbent Ma Ying-jeou (
Ma, the strongest candidate the KMT could have fielded, increased his margin of victory from 1998 by 13 percentage points.
But this was widely believed to be a comment on Lee's perceived lack of experience, rather than a rejection of the DPP per se.
Ma took 873,102 votes to Lee's 488,811, according to the Taipei Municipal Election Committee.
A total of 1,374,862 votes were cast out of 1,947,169 eligible voters, a turnout of 70.61 percent, approximately 10 percentage points lower than in 1998.
In the Taipei City Council election, the KMT remained the biggest party, winning 20 of the 52 seats up for grabs, with 32 percent of the vote. This represented a loss of three seats and eight percentage points of support from 1998.
DPP took 17 seats with 28.5 percent of the vote, down from 19 seats and 31 percent in 1998.
The PFP, which had never fought in a city council election before, won eight seats and took 17.5 percent of the vote, while the fading New Party took five seats with 9 percent of the vote, down from nine seats and 18.6 percent in 1998.
Two independents also won seats but the TSU, also fighting a city council election for the first time, failed to win any.
The results left the pan-blue camp consisting of the KMT, the PFP and the New Party dominating the council with 16 seats more than the green camp. This was no surprise, however, as Taipei has, compared with the rest of Taiwan, a disproportionately large number of ethnic mainlanders, considered iron votes for the blue camp.
Only three and a half hours after polls closed at 4pm, Ma made his victory speech from his Pateh Road campaign headquarters, expressing gratitude to his supporters as a crowd cheered and lit firecrackers in celebration.
"This victory is very meaningful," Ma said. "It means that Taipei citizens have recognized the work of [my] administrative team, endorsed my call for quality campaigning and shown their high expectations for Taipei City in the next four years.
"I will work to let Taipei voters know that their votes for me have not been in vain" Ma said.
At Lee's campaign headquarters, however, the mood was far from jubilant, with some supporters even weeping over the defeat, expected though it was.
Lee, holding a sunflower in his hand, remained smiling throughout the delivery of his concession speech.
"Although the result of the mayoral race produced no exclamation mark for me, I feel honored nevertheless," said Lee, with his wife, Laura Huang (
"I want to hereby offer my deepest thanks to Taipei voters who supported me so well even though they were not familiar with me," Lee said.
"I also want to thank my campaign team for their hard work and effort during this campaign period."
Lee added that he had telephoned Ma to give him his congratulations.
DPP headquarters noted that Lee's 36 percent of votes had safeguarded Taipei City's basic DPP vote bank.
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