President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) credibility has hit a new low with more than 60 percent of respondents in a public opinion survey released yesterday saying he is an “over-packaged product.”
The public’s view of Ma’s integrity has dipped further with negative responses about his image increasing by up to 8.5 percentage points on the same survey conducted by Taiwan Indicator Survey Research last year.
Ma’s latest 20.1 percent credibility rating was only slightly better than former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) at his worst mark of 17.7 percent, when Chen was embroiled in the 2006 corruption scandal. This is despite Ma and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enjoying a strong legislative majority and control of the executive branch.
In the poll, 62.9 percent of the respondents found Ma untrustworthy and 74.1 percent disapproved of his performance.
In a series of questions about Ma’s “brand image,” 63.9 percent of respondents said he was “over-packaged,” 58.8 percent said his abilities were “exaggerated” and 47 percent saw him as “an expired, deteriorating product.”
Numbers to the same questions in May last year increased by between 3.3 and 8.5 percentage points, showing that “Ma has become more unpopular,” a TISR press release showed.
With Ma being the only candidate in the KMT chairmanship election next week, 59.6 percent of respondents said his insistence on doubling as the president and KMT chairman was inappropriate, while 20.8 percent said it was appropriate and 19.6 percent declined to answer.
KMT supporters appeared to be struggling with Ma’s decision, TISR said, as a further breakdown found that 43.5 percent of the KMT supporters deemed it appropriate and 40.1 percent said otherwise.
However, the survey found that more than half of KMT supporters still opted to support Ma in the chairman election, with 53 percent saying that they would vote for him “to show KMT solidarity” and 33.2 percent saying that they preferred to cast invalid ballots “to warn Ma and give him a lesson.”
Asked whether his doubling as KMT chairman would help him fight corruption and rebuild the party’s image, 72.4 percent of those polled gave negative answers, while 12.6 percent was positive and 15.1 percent did not answer.
The poll, conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday, collected 1,005 valid samples and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
The domestically designed Teng Yun 2 drone passed development milestones over the weekend, flying for more than 10 hours straight and circling Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ), in the longest flight of an indigenous uncrewed combat aerial vehicle. Developed by the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology, the Teng Yun 2, or “Cloud Rider” (騰雲二型), recorded its longest flight yet over the weekend, after a three-hour test flight last month, followed by five and seven-hour stretches in the air. The Teng Yun 2 No. 1812 departed from Chiashan Air Base in Hualien County at 6:46pm on Saturday and flew on a
A slew of new measures are to take effect on Friday, including nationwide bring-your-own-cup discounts. The new rule requires chain beverage shops to offer discounts of at least NT$5 (US$0.17) to customers who bring their own cups, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has said. The policy would apply to more than 50,000 chain retail locations, including beverage shops, convenience stores, fast-food restaurants and supermarkets. It aims to cut down on waste from single-use plastic cups, more than 2.2 billion of which were used in Taiwan in 2020, the agency said. For convenience, the EPA said it has asked retailers to display signs stating how
TIMING: 'The CHIPS Act funding is crucial for us. In other words, if the act’s passage is delayed for too long, we will certainly need to adjust,’ chairwoman Doris Hsu said GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓) plans to start construction on a US$5 billion wafer fabrication facility in Texas in November, after passage of the US$52 billion Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act. The fab would be the largest of its kind in the US and one of the largest in the world, with a monthly capacity of 1.2 million wafers, GlobalWafers said, adding that the investment would be the first new fab in the US in more than 20 years and critical to closing a semiconductor supply chain gap. The world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier said the project, which
COUNTERING CHINA: ‘When democracies demonstrate what we can do ... I have no doubt that we’ll win that competition every time,’ US President Joe Biden said US President Joe Biden rebooted his effort to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) after an earlier campaign faltered, enlisting the support of G7 leaders at their summit in Germany. The Build Back Better World initiative, named after Biden’s domestic spending and climate agenda, struggled to get off the ground because not enough G7 partners contributed financially when it was unveiled a year ago, people familiar with its lack of progress said. “When democracies demonstrate what we can do — all that we have to offer — I have no doubt that we’ll win that competition every time,” Biden said during
RSS