DPP bigwig says referendum needed

A referendum must be held to empower the newly elected president to write a new constitution and put it to a popular vote, a panelist attending a forum said yesterday.

Emphasizing he did not speak for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) but as an academic given his past capacity as a political professor at the National Chungcheng University, DPP Secretary-General Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) argued that the country entered a "third republic" stage in 2004 when the Taiwanese exercised their right of holding referendums.

Lin the remarks while addressing a forum organized by the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei yesterday. The forum is the first of a series being held to examine the performance of the DPP administration over the past seven years.

Lin the "first republic" as the period that began in 1912 when the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution was enacted in China. The "second republic" began in 1991 when the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion (動員戡亂時期臨時條款) were abolished, although some contended that it began in 1996 when Taiwanese first elected state leaders, he said.

Lin to hold a referendum on whether to authorize the new president to form a committee within six months of taking office to draft a new constitution that is timely, viable and relevant to the needs of the Taiwanese people and put it to a vote after obtaining the approval of the legislature.

If the referendum were to win public support, a second referendum would be held after the draft proposal or proposals are completed.

Lin a national referendum would stand a better chance of succeeding if it were held in tandem with elections.

The DPP is in the process of collecting signatures for its referendum proposal to reclaim the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) stolen party assets. It hopes to mount the referendum concurrently with either the year-end legislative election or next year's presidential election, or better still, with both if the two elections are to be held together.

The party also hopes to hold another referendum on constitutional reform jointly with either of the elections.

Lin that nobody could resist the broad trend of constitutional reform and a referendum and that it would be wise for the KMT to accept this or face the consequences.

Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明), a political analysts at Academia Sinica, said that any referendum should not be limited to the KMT's party assets but should cover constitutional reform if a referendum were to be held together with either the legislative election or presidential poll.

Saying constitutional reform is urgently needed, Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋), former director of the now disbanded Constitutional Re-engineering Office at the Presidential Office, said the effort of constitutional reform has changed over the years.

While was controlled by a few political elites in the old days, Lee said now it is driven from the bottom-up.

Despite high legal threshold for constitutional amendments, he said he believed success would come if a public consensus were formed.