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Pan-blue camp puts merger on hold

Debates about the proposed pan-blue merger were called to a halt yesterday after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party (PFP) yesterday afternoon decided that both parties' energies should be focused on the year-end legislative elections, leaving merger concerns until next year.

Saying that the December elections should be the opposition parties' foremost concern in the coming months, the KMT and PFP decided to establish an election campaign coordination center to assist and organize the election efforts of all pan-blue candidates.

"I came here today to make sure that the procedures for a merger are in place. Just saying hurtful things about each other is not helpful at all. We need to unite, but that also means mutual respect. We hope that both parties can control their own members so that neither side hurts the other," PFP Deputy Secretary-General Chin Chin-sheng (秦金生) said at the cross-party negotiations at the KMT headquarters in Taipei yesterday, apparently referring to recent accusations by KMT elders that the PFP was holding up the merger.

Chin later told reporters that he and six other members of the PFP delegation had met with KMT Secretary-General Lin Fong-cheng (林豐正) yesterday afternoon and expressed the PFP's concerns about the merger.

When he spoke to Lin, Chin said, he emphasized that the PFP was not interested in completing an early merger just for the sake of merging.

"We want to create a united, strong opposition party," Chin said, adding that there would be no point to a merger if the New Party and the PFP still existed after the merger.

The ideologies and organization of the three parties must be negotiated and consolidated before they can form a brand new Chinese Nationalist Party, which will take time, Chin said.

Speaking on behalf of Lin, KMT Organization and Development Affairs Director-General Liao Feng-te (廖風德) told reporters the PFP had reassured the KMT at yesterday's talks that the merger was still on and that the resulting party would retain the name "Chinese Nationalist Party."

"We originally hoped that the merger would be able to take place before the elections. However, given that the candidates must register and begin their campaigns soon, we decided that we must instead focus on the legislative elections," Liao said, adding that the merger would take place in either January or February next year.

Speaking about the proposed election campaign coordination center, Liao said that the center would act mostly as a crisis management task force to resolve possible conflicts between candidates running in the same district.

The result of the afternoon meeting contradicted a call from KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) earlier yesterday for a pre-elections merger.

Speaking at the first meeting of the party's newly-elected Central Standing Committee yesterday morning, Lien praised the New Party for its sacrifice of having its legislative candidates run under the KMT banner and urged all pan-blue parties to merge as early as possible.

"The PFP needs to make a decision now. In this time of elections, uniting is the only road. Time is passing, do not delay [the merger] any longer," Lien said.

At the Central Standing Committee meeting, the KMT officially acknowledged that it would assist the campaigns of the seven candidates the New Party is nominating under the KMT as soon as they complete the procedures needed to become party candidates.

The standing committee members also passed a proposal to not nominate candidates in the Kinmen and Lienchiang voting districts out of respect for fellow opposition candidates running in those districts. The one candidate running under the New Party banner, Wu Cheng-tien (吳成典), is the incumbent legislator representing Kinmen.
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