The pan-blue parties yesterday said they would turn their informal alliance into a formal pact tomorrow via videoconference.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his People First Party (PFP) counterpart, James Soong (宋楚瑜), will reach an accord tomorrow morning via videoconference to formalize the alliance between the parties.
It was not immediately clear how this would change the relationship between the two pan-blue parties, which have been ideologically and politically aligned since the PFP was formed in 2000.
Holiday
Soong is currently on vacation in San Francisco, California, after his defeat in last month's Taipei mayoral election.
The idea of formalizing the KMT-PFP alliance emerged during a private meeting last month between Ma and Soong.
The two said at the time that the top priority of the parties would be to coordinate a strategy for the legislative elections at the end of this year.
The KMT's Central Standing Committee passed a draft of the proposal to formalize the alliance on Jan. 3.
The committee also said that the KMT and the PFP would "negotiate" to field candidates for the legislative elections and 2008 presidential election.
KMT Secretary-General Wu Den-yih (
The PFP was founded by Soong, a former KMT member who left the party under a cloud, after failing to secure its presidential candidacy in 2000, as well as being accused of embezzling party funds.
Weakened
Both parties sought to emphasize the establishment of a formal alliance as a move necessary to "increase cooperation" between the two parties. However, the PFP has been weakened in recent years by a series of electoral defeats and defections by prominent lawmakers to the KMT.
When the legislature is reduced by half next year, and the nation moves to a single-member district system, smaller political parties like the PFP will have a difficult time maintaining a meaningful presence in the Legislative Yuan.
The retirement of Soong has also left many party members questioning the long-term viability of the PFP.
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
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,
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