The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday said it was readying itself ahead of what it expects will be substantial gains in the upcoming legislative and presidential elections.
In clear signs the DPP believes this year will be a resurgent year, party politicians have scrambled to announce legislative bids, even in Taipei City, where it failed to pick up a single seat in 2008.
Those ambitions received a shot in the arm yesterday when DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said the DPP was crafting policies to be “ready” if the party re-entered the Presidential Office next year.
Photo: Wang Han-ping, Taipei Times
The 10-year “master plan” the DPP has been working on and the two think tanks it recently established will connect the party’s eight years of administration from 2000 to 2008 to “when it runs government again,” Tsai said.
Tsai and other party officials met representatives from the biotechnology sector in Greater Tainan, calling it an area where the former DPP administration made important breakthroughs.
“It was a very important and successful plan, but we want to understand how we can make this industry even stronger and help it expand further,” said Tsai, calling it an indication that the DPP was ready to tackle Taiwan’s economic issues.
In the past month, DPP politicians have also floated new ideas on how cross-strait ties should be conducted.
DPP politicians hope the party will win a majority of seats in the next legislature, spurred by public concerns over cross-strait ties and a long list of economic woes, including growing income disparities and stagnating wages.
In 2008, the DPP took 27 of the 113 seats in the legislature.
It hopes to win two more in Greater Kaohsiung and Greater Tainan — both DPP strongholds — in Saturday’s by-elections.
However, even in Taipei City, there is optimism that the DPP could pick up seats in central and northern districts as well as several more in New Taipei City (新北市), where it only took two seats in 2008 when it was known as Taipei County.
Former DPP legislator Tuan Yi-kang (段宜康) yesterday announced his candidacy in the Shilin-Beitou electoral district, putting his name in an already packed field that includes another former lawmaker and a former Cabinet spokesperson.
“We could even see more candidates such as [former DPP Legislator] Lo Wen-chia (羅文嘉),” said former DPP legislator Julian Kuo (郭正亮), another candidate in the riding.
The DPP has set a deadline for Saturday next week for potential legislative candidates to finish filling out their paperwork for nominations.
It expects to complete a final list of legislative candidates by the middle of next month.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching