On a scale of 0 to 100, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his Cabinet team received 55.1 points for overall performance, a poll in the Chinese-language Global Views magazine showed yesterday.
Although the score of 55.1 was a 4.4-point improvement on December last year, when asked to compare the Ma administration's performance with that two years ago, only 27.3 percent of respondents said it had improved, while 31.3 percent said it had not and 35.7 percent did not see any change, the figures showed.
The poll, conducted by the Global Views Survey Research Center, put Ma's popularity at 30.4 percent, up 3.8 percentage points from last month. His disapproval rating dropped 2.5 percentage points, but remained high at 58.9 percent.
Ma's trust index grew 5.2 percentage points from last month to 42.3 percent, against his distrust index of 44.5 percent — down 0.2 percentage points.
The pollster attributed the change to Ma’s “better-than-expected” performance in the April 25 debate with Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China.
Despite the high disapproval rating of the Ma government's performance, the poll showed that 45.3 percent of respondents thought the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) would do a better job of protecting Taiwan’s interests and developing cross-strait peace than the DPP, which polled 29.9 percent.
The poll also showed that more people were happy with Ma's cross-strait policy than foreign policy, with 47.8 percent believing cross-strait policy to have been successful and only 43.4 percent feeling the same way about foreign policy as a whole.
Former director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Douglas Paal said in Washington last month that the US should invite Ma to attend the APEC summit in Honolulu in November next year.
Nearly 52 percent of respondents agreed that Ma should discuss Taiwan’s future and cross-strait relations with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) before the end of his term, against 34.7 percent who disapproved and 13.9 percent who had no opinion.
Though high, these figures still represented a 16.8 percent fall in the number favoring a Ma-Hu summit and a 19.1 percent increase in those who did not want to see such a meeting.
On the performance of the Cabinet, Premier Wu Den-yih's (吳敦義) popularity edged up 1.4 percentage points from last month to 42.7 percent. However, his disapproval rating also increased 3.6 percentage points to 42.6 percent.
Only 31.2 percent of respondents found the performance of Cabinet officials satisfactory, while 50.2 percent said they were not satisfied. The numbers were, however, still an improvement on last month.
The poll was conducted from May 13 to May 16 and 1,010 adults were questioned nationwide.
Ma yesterday marked the second anniversary of his inauguration with a visit to an elementary school in Hsinchu. The school educates physically and mentally challenged students together with normal children.
While Hsinchu is the only county that offers such an education, Ma said he had instructed the Ministry of Education to evaluate the possibility of expanding it.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Paal said that Ma had transformed one of the Asia-Pacific’s hot spots — the Taiwan Strait — into “an area of unprecedented peace and growing prosperity while not letting down Taiwan's guard.”
“This is something Americans truly appreciate,” he said.
Paal said that transitioning Taiwan's laws and institutions to meet the economic challenges and opportunities of the global community continues to be a work in progress.
Under Ma, Taiwan’s government is positioning itself closer to the interests of Taiwan's economic leaders “while taking care of those at risk of falling behind,” Paal said.
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