Academic forecasts positive effect of municipal elections

The results of the just-concluded elections for mayors and city councilors in the country's two largest cities of Taipei and Kaohsiung will have a positive effect on domestic economic development, a scholar said yesterday.

Wu Chung-shu (吳中書), a research fellow with the Institute of Economics of the Academia Sinica, Taiwan's highest academic body, said the electoral results were no surprise, with incumbents re-elected to mayoral posts of the two special municipalities.

"This development is conducive to maintaining domestic political stability and minimizing uncertainty in the business environment," Wu said.

While the DPP managed to cling onto the Kaohsiung mayoralty, the KMT tightened its grip on the Taipei mayoralty.

"But their winning margins were not as large as originally predicted," Wu said. "My observation was that voters have mixed feelings about the two major parties' performances. They think that each party has both merits and flaws and needs improvements."

Before the elections, public opinion pollsters generally predicted that DPP candidate for Taipei mayor Lee Ying-yuan (李應元) would garner only 27 percent of the vote.

In the end, Lee gained about 35 percent of the vote, compared to incumbent Mayor Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) 65 percent. Lee's higher-than-expected support rate indicated that the DPP didn't suffer a serious defeat in Taipei, a stronghold of the pan-blue camp.

In the southern port city of Kaohsiung, Mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) of the DPP won about 50 percent of the vote, slighter higher than nearly 47 percent captured by his closest challenger, the KMT's Huang Jun-ying (黃俊英).

"Kaohsiung has been a DPP stronghold, but Hsieh didn't win by a landslide. This indicates that the DPP government should craft a clear economic policy to revitalize the island's flagging economy. Otherwise, voters will eventually vote it down in future elections," Wu said.

In his view, Wu said, voters are the real winners of the elections as the mixed electoral results should push all major domestic political parties to make further efforts to improve themselves.

Noting that certain candidates in the Kaohsiung election resorted to mudslinging campaigning, Wu said the defeat of those candidates show that negative campaigning tactics have lost their appeal to voters.

"The results will contribute to the upgrading of the political campaign culture here," he said.