President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) face a crisis of confidence, academics said yesterday, citing poll results in which more than 70 percent of respondents were not satisfied with the government’s performance in dealing with the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot.
“The government, headed by Ma and Liu, is apparently facing a serious crisis of confidence — people no longer trust their ability to handle crises, and also question their credibility,” Soochow University political science professor Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) said at a news conference that Taiwan Thinktank held to release the results of its poll on the government’s rescue and relief work.
The think tank is generally believed to sympathize with the pan-green camp.
In the poll’s 1,018 valid samples, 76.2 percent of the respondents were not satisfied with Ma’s performance in handling the aftermath of the storm, while 77.3 percent said they were not satisfied with Liu’s performance.
When asked if they agreed with Liu when he claimed that the current government’s rescue and relief efforts were faster than those order by former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) after the 921 Earthquake on Sept. 21, 1999 — which claimed nearly 2,500 lives, destroyed more than 44,000 houses and caused US$9.1 billion in damage — 70.7 percent of the respondents said they disagreed.
Meanwhile, 71.4 percent of the respondents said they did not believe the Presidential Office’s claim that Ma knew nothing beforehand about the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ rejection of foreign aid.
“The results show that the public thinks the government is both incapable and lying,” Lo said. “Ma said during his presidential campaign last year that a government that has lost the trust of the people should not to stay in power — well, apparently his government has reached that stage [based on his own standards].”
Seventy-two percent of the respondents said they had either donated items or money, volunteered or done both to help typhoon victims.
The survey also showed that 78.9 percent of the respondents thought that the public — individuals and non-governmental organizations alike — were doing a better job than the government in rescue and relief efforts.
Soochow University political science professor Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said that Ma and Liu were the two officials with the highest disapproval rating among all officials in the survey.
“It doesn’t make sense that it will be these two men who will decide who the replacement ministers will be,” Hsu said.
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