Yesterday's election was billed as a must win for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), as an unfavorable result would raise the prospect of challenges to his leadership emerging in the pan-blue camp in the lead up to the 2008 presidential election, political analysts said.
The result -- retaining the mayoral position in Taipei but failing to challenge the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Kaohsiung -- did not provide the unambiguous result Ma needed, they said.
Taipei has usually been considered a pan-blue city, with two-thirds of voters favoring the pan-blue camp -- consisting of the KMT, People First Party (PFP) and the New Party -- in previous elections.
As electoral behavior in Taipei hasn't changed much in recent years, the KMT's re-election was predicable, said Liu I-chu (劉義周), a political science professor at National Chengchi University.
"Because we had candidates that were incapable of drawing voters from the other side, and a string of scandals had dissuaded swing voters from casting ballots, the election was basically determined by diehard pan-blue and pan-green voters," Liu said.
In this regard, the indicator needed to gauge how convincingly the KMT won Taipei was not Hau Lung-bin's (郝龍斌) level of voter support but the number of votes PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) obtained, said Chao Yung-mau (趙永茂), a political science professor at National Taiwan University.
According to the Taipei Municipal Election Committee, Soong garnered 4.14 percent of the vote, much lower than the party's 17.6 percent showing in the 2002 city councilor election and 17.11 percent it won in the 2004 legislative election.
`Dump-save'
The "dump save" tactic of the 1998 Taipei mayoral election -- in which the New Party candidate ran a distant third with 2.97 percent of the vote, one-tenth of what the party received in 1994 -- emerged again.
"The result will make KMT-PFP relations, which were already damaged due to their deep rifts ahead of the election, even worse," Chao said. "With Soong receiving few votes, the drag effect that PFP has been exerting on the KMT would be significantly reduced."
Liu shared a similar view, saying that the election had proved that smaller parties or independents have little chance of winning elections, especially in polls where only one seat is being contested.
"The PFP will be gradually weakened in the face of the 2007 legislative election, which is going to employ the single member-district, two-vote system,'" Liu said.
Considering this, Liu said the gauge of the KMT's victory this time should be the Kaohsiung mayoral election, which is also of significance to the party's development.
"At this time when the DPP's support rate is at an historically low, Ma needs to explain why the KMT was unable to beat DPP," said Chiou Chang-tay (丘昌泰), a former director of the Research Center for Public Opinion and Election Studies at National Taipei University.
Chiou said that while the southern city has been the stronghold of the pan-green camp, standard electoral behavior provides an insufficient explanation of the KMT's failure in Kaohsiung.
"The failure would surely pose a challenge to Ma's leadership of the KMT. On the one hand, Ma's acceptability in southern Taiwan is still questionable. On the other, failing to defeat a DPP embroiled in multiple troubles was a frustration to the KMT," Chiou said.
While Ma has been widely viewed as a shoo-in for the 2008 presidential election by pan-blue supporters, a small group of ethnic Taiwanese lawmakers are not so confident.
Lien-Wang ticket
About 30 lawmakers, who are on good terms with former KMT chairman Lien Chan (
"The DPP's election could provide encouragement to the KMT's pro-localizational faction, empowering them to make more demands of Ma on issues of concern to them," Chao said.
For the KMT as a whole, Chiou said the party should take it as a "warning."
"Over the past six years after losing power in 2000, the fact that Hau didn't garner as many votes as expected and KMT candidate Huang Chun-ying's (黃俊英) loss to DPP candidate Chen Chu (陳菊) suggests that the party hasn't extended its supporting basis through reform," he added.
‘EFFECTIVE DETERRENCE’: If the Biden administration suspends arms sales to Taiwan, the military could still ready a nimble fighting force for defense, an analyst said The “US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific” last week sparked debate among analysts after US President Donald Trump declassified the document 20 years ahead of schedule. Trump on Tuesday last week released the document that had governed US strategic action in the region since the US leader approved its use in 2018. The document, which outlines US priorities in the region, emphasizes the importance of defending Taiwan against military aggression and facilitating the country’s development of asymmetric strategies and capabilities. The overall directive of the document is for the US to prevent China from establishing sustained air and sea dominance inside the first
SECOND RULING: Israeli-American Oren Shlomo Mayer refused to sign a court transcript, complained about the court translator and said the trial had been unfair The High Court yesterday upheld New Taipei City District Court’s verdicts on four men convicted last year in connection with the 2018 murder and dismemberment of a Canadian citizen on the banks of the Sindian River (新店溪). It found American-Israeli Oren Shlomo Mayer and American Ewart Odane Bent guilty of homicide and the abandonment and destruction of a corpse, with Mayer sentenced to life in prison and Bent given a term of 12 years and six months, for the death of Sanjay Ryan Ramgahan, whose body parts were found in a riverside park under Zhongzheng Bridge in New Taipei’s Yonghe
ALLEVIATING FEARS: The CECC would only announce public places where it is difficult to identify everyone there at the same time as the couple, minister Chen said The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday announced six places where two locally infected COVID-19 cases had visited between Thursday last week and Sunday, urging people who had been at the places at the same time to monitor their health. The couple, cases 838, a doctor, and 839, his nurse girlfriend, were reported by the center on Tuesday. The doctor had treated a patient with COVID-19 last week before he began suffering symptoms on Friday, while the nurse began suffering symptoms on Saturday. They work in the same hospital in northern Taiwan, but the nurse had not worked with COVID-19 patients, so
A lawyer and a prosecutor yesterday castigated what they called a lenient ruling by the High Court on Luo Wen-shan (羅文山), whose prison sentence was reduced to two years, which he does not need to serve, after he was convicted for receiving illegal political donations from China to meddle in Taiwan’s elections. Investigators found that Luo, who retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant general, had accepted NT$8.38 million (US$294,604 at the current exchange rate) under the guise of political contributions from Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member Xu Zhiming (許智明) and people in Hong Kong from 2008 to
RSS