Students, netizens initiate recall of KMT lawmakers

Students and netizens yesterday announced the official commencement of a campaign to recall three Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators.

The campaign, first proposed on March 25 on PTT — the nation’s largest academic online bulletin board — sought the recall of KMT lawmakers Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池), Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) and Alex Tsai (蔡正元) to, as stated in the original post, “reduce the advantages of the pan-blue majority” following an incident panned by the student-led Sunflower movement as the government’s “black-box” — opaque — handling of the cross-strait service trade agreement.

The campaign urged its supporters to print and fill out the petition included as an attachment and called for donations to support the appeal.

Campaign spokesperson Lin Tzu-yi (林祖儀) said the movement targeted Lin Hung-chih, Tsai and Wu because the three had received a large number of votes from netizens to be targeted for recall over the past month.

“Our supporters have been urging us to take it to the next step, which prompted the campaign’s commencement,” Lin Tzu-yi said, adding that the campaign management team would later publish its agenda and reasoning for the action.

In February, Wu was the target of a failed recall campaign initiated by the Constitution 133 Alliance, which said he had failed to serve the public interest and was President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) “yes-man.”

Despite the failure of the alliance’s recall bid, the management team of the campaign yesterday said it has learned many lessons from the alliance’s senior members, including its founder Neil Peng (馮光遠) and Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), Lin Tzu-yi said.

When reached for comments, Tsai yesterday was dismissive of the campaign, saying: “Frivolous people do silly things.”

“I have no interest whatsoever in people who have no ability to pay their taxes or be productive,” he added.

Aside from saying that the campaign management team are “instigators,” Wu declined to comment.

Lin Hung-chih said he respected people’s right to initiate a recall, but added that a democratic society should be more respectful toward different opinions.

Legislators are being threatened with recall because of their opinions on certain policies rather than for being engaged in illegal activity, he said, adding that he doubted that the mentality of the campaign’s organizers was democratic.