The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will unveil a new platform for coordinating government and party opinions to facilitate the "collective leadership" that the president promised two months ago during its national convention this weekend.
The party has been busy over the past week discussing ways to react to the call by some pan-green academics for the president to resign. After convening a series of meetings on working out countermeasures, the DPP yesterday preliminarily decided that it would create a mechanism that would allow "collective discussion" between the government and the DPP so that the party could avoid criticisms that President Chen Shui-bian (
DPP spokesman Tsai Huang-liang (
While this plan has not been carried out well so far, the voice of the pan-green academics has prompted the DPP to expedite the collective discussion mechanism, he said.
For starters, the DPP will try to turn its weekly Central Standing Committee meeting into a platform that serves as a communication channel for officials from the Presidential Office, Executive Yuan, Legislative Yuan and the DPP, Tsai said.
The Central Standing Committee will also facilitate discussion and resolution of policy changes or personnel reshuffle initiated by the Executive Yuan in hopes of working out a model of "collective leadership," he said.
The DPP would also consider whether it should propose changing the form of government into a parliamentary system.
All these ideas will be put into discussion in the national convention to be held on Saturday and Sunday, Tsai said.
Meanwhile, to settle the internal squabbling between factions over whether party legislators should have heeded the president's call for a meeting or demand that the president resign, Yu invited faction leaders to lunch and asked them to be more tolerant at this critical period for the DPP.
New Tide leader, Legislator William Lai (賴清德), also held a press conference yesterday to clarify that the faction was not in favor of the president resigning or withdrawing from the DPP, and urged all members to stop the dispute.
"What the DPP needs now is unity, not division," Lai said.
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