Thu, Dec 08, 2005 page1

• Annette Lu set to helm routed DPP

  TOP DOG The vice president was selected to take over from Chairman Su Tseng-chang, as the party offered a dazzling array of excuses for its electoral defeat

  • By Jewel Huang / STAFF REPORTER
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  Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) will take over the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as acting chairwoman, in the wake of Su Tseng-chang's (蘇貞昌) resignation from the party's top job to shoulder responsibility for the DPP's election debacle.

  After its defeat in the three-in-one elections held last Saturday, the DPP held a weekly Central Standing Committee meeting yesterday afternoon to discuss the failure and the direction of the party. Within a few hours, all the committee members had resolved that Lu should assume the DPP's top post, as Su insisted on resigning yesterday.

  "I'm also surprised at this resolution. To be frank, I have no preparation for this post at all," Lu said after walking out of the meeting.

  "All the committee members approved of Chairman Su's painstaking efforts and thought that he had done his best in this election, and many of them suggested that he stay on," Lu said. "However, although we called him during the meeting, Su still insisted on leaving."

  Lu said that she would ask for advice from DPP officials as soon as possible.

  During the meeting, the DPP also decided that an election for the post will be held within one month, and the new chairperson will be elected around the end of next month, Secretary-General Lee Yi-yang (李逸洋) said yesterday.

  After the fiasco of the "three-in-one" elections on Saturday, Lee said that the DPP had come up with seven major causes for the trouncing in a report, and that committee members shared their opinions for more than three hours.

  Former Presidential Office secretary-general Chen Che-nan's (陳哲男) involvement in the Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Corp (KRTC) scandal triggered a chain reaction of muckraking, which mauled the DPP's image of integrity and reform and weakened voter's trust in the party, the report said.

  Even President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) apology, investigation and expulsion of Chen Che-nan from the DPP could not appease voter distrust, Lee said. And because the mass media and the opposition parties "played up" the incident, voter support for the party declined all the way to polling day, he said.

  Second, the government's performance did not meet the public's expectations, and people were not satisfied with the pace of reform, the report said.

  "Although we earned a positive reaction from local residents, the central government did not perform as well as people expected," Lee said.

  Third, combining the elections of local government chiefs, township chiefs and city and county councilors into the "three-in-one" elections was another key to the DPP's defeat, the report said.

  The report said that although combining the elections -- a policy devised by the DPP government -- saved social and governmental resources and simplified the elections, the policy was actually advantageous to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which has a stronger and more solid local network than the DPP.

  "The KMT has strong organizations of so-called "vote captains," who are usually borough chiefs. The elections made it convenient for the KMT to launch united campaigns for their candidates and to implement comprehensive vote-buying," Lee said. "In that regard, DPP candidates suffered from the [DPP's] policy, although the reform is good."
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