The results of the today’s special municipality elections will help shape the wider political landscape over the next few years, according to political observers.
Although they are just local elections, the outcome will have implications for President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his policy on China as well as for the nation’s two main political parties.
For starters, academics said, the share of seats and votes in the five municipality elections will give an indication of the national standing of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and their chances in the 2012 presidential elections.
The results will also be viewed as an endorsement or rejection of Ma’s policies of deregulation, liberalization and reconciliation, particularly with regard to China, the academics said.
If the KMT scores at least a 3-to-2 win in the five races, it will be seen as a vote of confidence in Ma’s general policies and -performance, said Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), a research fellow at National Chengchi University’s Institute of International Relations.
On the other hand, a 3-to-2 win for the DPP would give it “the right momentum to contest the 2012 presidential election,” he said.
China, meanwhile, will be closely gauging the elections in Taipei City, Sinbei City (the new name for Taipei County after its upgrade next month), Greater Taichung, Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung in order to better plan its future moves, he said.
“For China, the share of votes may be a good indicator of the outcome of the 2012, election since the electorate in the five cities make up almost 65 percent of Taiwan’s total population of 23 million,” Wu said.
China will be looking for a clue to Ma’s chances of retaining power in 2012, but is unlikely to react strongly to the election results, preferring instead to play down their importance, said Wu, a former chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council.
Liu Shih-chung (劉世忠), a research fellow for national security affairs at the Taiwan Brain Trust, said “a KMT victory would increase the chances of political talks -between the party and its Chinese counterpart in Ma’s second term.”
Meanwhile, a DPP victory would signal a rebirth of the party after its loss in the 2008 presidential election, Liu said.
For at least two of the candidates in the elections, the poll could serve as a launch pad to bigger ambitions, one of the academics said.
The neck-and-neck race in the two northern cities of Taipei and Sinbei is like a presidential primary for the DPP, according to Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明), an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Soochow University.
The DPP candidates, Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) in Taipei City and DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in Sinbei, are the two favorites to win the party’s nomination for the 2012 presidential election, Hsu said.
They are seeking not just mayoral seats, but also wider electoral support, he said.
He expressed the view that this time voters are more focused on economic issues and the candidates themselves rather than on the thorny independence-unification issue that has dominated campaigns in the past.
The forum was titled “The special municipality elections: possible impacts and implications” and it was attended by more than 20 overseas representatives.
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
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
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,