Sixty-seven percent of respondents surveyed in a poll released by the Taiwan Thinktank (台灣智庫) yesterday said that they oppose political parties intervening in the March 19 Shooting Truth Investigation Special Committee and they welcomed its establishment.
The poll also showed that about 40 percent of respondents think the special committee organized by the legislators will not be more impartial than the law enforcement agency that probed the attempted assassination of the president and vice president.
Taiwan Thinktank, a foundation that focuses on researching government policies and regularly conducts public surveys, commissioned Focus Survey Research (山水民意研究公司) to conduct the survey on Aug. 27 and Aug. 28 among 1,027 adults nationwide about their viewpoints on the constitutional amendment bills and the March 19 Shooting Truth Investigation Special Committee Statute (三一九槍擊事件真相調查特別委員會條例) that were passed last week.
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After legislators passed the bills to halve the number of legislative seats and implement "a single-member district, two-vote electoral system" last week, 81.4 percent of respondents said that they think the DPP and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) would become the two major political parties af-ter the legislative changes take place. Only 6.2 percent of people agreed that the People First Party (PFP) will be one of the two major parties. This illustrates that the PFP's supporters are experiencing a confidence crisis regarding the party's future, Taipei Society chairman Hung Yu-hung (洪裕宏) said yesterday in a news conference.
Hung said, however, that small parties like the PFP and Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) would still have their own niches under such an electoral system as long as they focus on creating a conspicuous party image and cultivating belief in their causes among their supporters.
Meanwhile, about 65 percent of those polled think that any impeachment of the president should be decided by a people's referendum, not by the Council of Grand Justices, which was empowered to impeach the president in the amendments.
Kao Yung-cheng (高涌誠), head of the Judicial Reform Foundation, said that the survey showed that the unreasonable statutes have enraged the general public, who do not have much legal knowledge.
Kao said that he hoped this survey could draw the pan-blue camp's attention to its inept creations and also hoped the statute on the shooting matter would be vetoed by the Executive Yuan next week, as is widely expected in legal circles.
Taiwan is projected to lose a working-age population of about 6.67 million people in two waves of retirement in the coming years, as the nation confronts accelerating demographic decline and a shortage of younger workers to take their place, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan experienced its largest baby boom between 1958 and 1966, when the population grew by 3.78 million, followed by a second surge of 2.89 million between 1976 and 1982, ministry data showed. In 2023, the first of those baby boom generations — those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s — began to enter retirement, triggering
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