The latest in a series of controversial revisions for the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) nomination process includes a change that will give party officials more power when choosing legislator-at-large candidates.
The party’s Central Executive Committee yesterday voted to scrap a method using both popular and party member votes as well as direct appointments to determine legislator-at-large candidates.
Instead, future candidates will be chosen by a task force led by the DPP chairperson and approved by two-thirds of the executive committee.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
The DPP has been revising the way it selects candidates for president, legislators and legislators-at-large over the past month.
On Wednesday last week, party officials agreed to phase out a party member vote for presidential and legislative nominees in favor of telephone polls, while discussion for the legislators-at-large was delayed until yesterday.
Legislators-at-large are elected based on a party’s overall share of the popular vote nationwide. In each legislative election, 34 are chosen.
The move will help resolve factional divisions and allow the party to choose from a wider pool of candidates from non-political fields, DPP Secretary-General Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) said.
However, one member of the committee who disagreed with the revision said he feared the move would give DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and the task force “too much power.”
Taking out the popular and party member vote as part of the legislator-at-large nominations was a “step backward,” DPP Legislator Chai Trong-rong (蔡同榮) said. “The DPP should be progressing toward democracy, not shying away from it.”
DPP circles have been abuzz lately with the proposed changes, which will all need to be approved by the party congress on Saturday before it can come into effect. The revisions will impact on how the party’s politicians jockey for power and affect factional divisions.
A small group of party supporters protested audibly in front of DPP headquarters yesterday in support of former vice president Annette Lu’s (呂秀蓮) proposal to retain party member polls.
Elsewhere, pro-independence groups held a press conference, saying the DPP should give more weight to pan-green votes in the public polls for legislative and presidential candidates.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift