The Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) failure to win a legislative majority in Saturday's election was due to the party's overconfidence, which stemmed from a belief that voters who had been disappointed with the pan-blue camp after the March presidential election would automatically switch to supporting the pan-green camp, a DPP report said yesterday.
The review of the party's Saturday election defeat was released by Secretary-General Chang Chun-hsiung (
According to the report, the DPP over-estimated the attraction of the Taiwan-centered consciousness asserted by the result of the March presidential election.
"The DPP committed many strategic mistakes, including the failure to solicit support from neutral voters, the reluctance to look for new voters, and overconfidence, all of which made us deviate from the principle of caution," said Chang.
However, Chang noted that the DPP garnered the largest number of legislative seats and the highest vote share of any party in the elections.
The DPP gained 23,000 more votes this year compared to the 2001 legislative elections -- an increase of 2.34 percent, the report said.
Apart from the DPP, all other party's overall vote counts decreased. The TSU lost some 44,000 votes, while the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lost 8,000 votes and the PFP lost a whopping 560,000.
"The whole pan-blue camp lost a total of 619,000 votes," Chang said, quoting the report.
"But in fact, voters' change in attitude was much slower than we imagined," Chang said, commenting on voters who had been disappointed by the pan-blue camp's behavior after the presidential election.
Chang was also upset with the fact that the DPP's appeal to strengthen Taiwan's national identity during the campaign had been distorted as challenging the status quo.
He admitted that the DPP's mismanaged vote-allocation strategy was responsible for the defeat of a number of incumbent DPP legislators who enjoy high ratings in opinion polls, saying the party will conduct a thorough review of the errors.
Meanwhile, many DPP politicians said there is no hurry for the party to hold a direct election for the position of party chairman after Chen's resignation.
DPP Legislator Shen Fu-hsiung (沈富雄) said the party's legislative caucus leader, Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘), should act as party chairman until the government has completed a Cabinet reshuffle, which will take place concurrent with the new legislators being sworn in on Feb. 1.
Agreeing with Shen, Lin Yu-sheng (
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,