A proposal to postpone the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Central Committee and Central Standing Committee elections is to be forwarded to agencies within the party for further discussion before the Central Standing Committee revisits the issue next week, KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) said yesterday.
Hung issued the directive at a weekly meeting of the party’s Central Standing Committee.
The elections for the Central Committee and Central Standing Committee are scheduled for July 8 and July 29 respectively.
Photo: CNA
However, Central Standing Committee member Lee Te-wei (李德維) and 25 other KMT officials proposed that the elections be postponed.
The proposal said that to ensure the elections are in compliance with the KMT’s charter and to avoid them being invalidated by the courts, they should be pushed back to September, after the conclusion of the party’s national congress.
The party elected committee members ahead of its 18th and 19th national congresses, but those were exceptions that contravened the party’s charter and its election rules, the proposal said.
During the 17th KMT national congress, former president and then-KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) issued a resolution to postpone the elections, Lee said.
It was meant to maintain order during the congress, as party representatives were feverishly canvassing votes for their factions during the meeting, Lee said.
Soon after yesterday’s Central Standing Committee meeting began, participants took turns to give emotional speeches, entreating Hung to push back the elections.
If they were postponed, it would allow KMT chairperson-elect Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), who is set to take office on Aug. 20, to gain control of committee nomination rights.
Central Standing Committee member and Taipei City Councilor Li Keng Kuei-fang (厲耿桂芳) said she hoped Hung would end her term gracefully and thanked her for showing the resolve to lead the KMT during its most desperate times.
Citing a Yahoo Taiwan poll that put the public’s dissatisfaction rating with the KMT at 71 percent, Li said the party should heed that warning and promote solidarity, so that it can regroup and regain power.
Central Standing Committee member Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔) called on Hung and Wu to have enough wisdom to resolve the election dispute, so that the party can focus on next year’s local elections and the 2020 presidential election and “make the KMT great again.”
It would be “terrible” if the legitimacy of the elections were determined by a court of law, she said.
The atmosphere quickly took a turn for the worse when KMT Evaluation and Control Office Director Liu Han-ting (劉漢廷) said that the election rules cited by the Wu camp contravene the Civil Associations Act (人民團體法), which stipulates that the election of directors and supervisors of a civic group should be held at least one month before — not after — the term of incumbent board members expires.
That means the Central Standing Committee election should be held before committee members’ term ends on July 29.
Central Standing Committee member Lu Hsueh-chang (呂學樟) accused Liu of misrepresenting the act, saying that the KMT has the right to set its own election rules, which stipulate that the incoming — rather than outgoing — chairperson should submit a list of Central Committee member nominees to be reviewed by KMT representatives who chair the congress.
Seeing that the proceedings had ground to a halt, Hung, who chaired the meeting, ruled that the proposal would be dealt with during a committee meeting next week.
At a post-meeting interview, Hung said she would resign before Aug. 20 regardless of Wu’s decision to carry out an early transition.
She also dismissed rumors that she plans to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for the second time at a cross-strait forum between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party scheduled to be held in China’s Fujian Province on June 17.
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