A refusal by a number of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) county councilors to vote for DPP-supported candidates in Monday’s municipal council speaker elections is said to have infuriated DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
The DPP was widely expected to win the elections for either council speaker or deputy speaker in Yilan County, with the number of county councilors evenly divided between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the DPP 17 to 17. However, six last-minute votes by DPP councilors for the KMT-nominated candidate resulted in a win for the KMT’s Chang Chien-rong (張建榮).
A similar case was also confirmed to have taken place in Chiayi City.
Meanwhile, two other incidents in Yunlin and Miaoli counties were being investigated by DPP officials, with both the counties having elected KMT-supported candidates.
DPP Spokesman Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) said yesterday after a weekly meeting of the party’s standing committee that Tsai Ing-wen was “furious about the incidents.”
Seven of the confirmed cases in Yilan and Chiayi counties have been reported to the party’s ethics committee, Tsai Chi-chang confirmed. Tsai Ing-wen has reportedly asked the committee to expel the councilors if they are found guilty.
“Their actions were a serious violation against the party,” the DPP spokesman said. “We are still investigating the violations in Yunlin and Miaoli counties. If any party member is found [guilty] ... we will request that they be expelled.”
Despite the lost votes, DPP-supported councilors were elected in Chiayi City, Chiayi County and Hsinchu County. Meanwhile, eight of the 10 KMT nominees for council speaker were elected.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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