An announcement by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) reluctantly supporting a merger of the legislative and presidential elections was met with a lukewarm response by DPP lawmakers yesterday.
The DPP caucus told a press conference that party lawmakers believed the move could spark a “constitutional crisis” and risk prolonging a lame duck session before the new president is inaugurated.
The remarks came despite a consensus reached at a late night meeting between potential DPP presidential contenders and other senior DPP officials on Sunday.
Explaining the conclusions reached by the group, DPP Secretary-General Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) said the party believed the plan was viable, but added that more time was needed for discussion.
“Basically, the DPP doesn’t oppose the measure and is willing to work with the ruling party to make the changes by revising the Constitution,” Su said. “Merging the two elections is something that should be done in the future.”
The issue came to light earlier after a leaked memo by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) said the party would work to approve the elections merger. The Central Election Commission had said a decision was due in June.
The next presidential poll is currently scheduled for March next year, while the next legislative elections are likely to be held in December this year or January next year, based on existing rules.
If passed, the changes would likely move the presidential date forward as the law requires that legislative elections be held before a new legislative session starts on Feb. 1.
Commentators have expressed concern that this would lengthen the period between when a president is elected and the time he or she takes office on May 20 — concerns that government officials have said they would study.
The DPP has said that despite comments by the KMT and the commission that they would study the proposal, neither has aggressively pushed the idea amid mixed reactions from the public and lawmakers.
There are also questions whether the move might further marginalize smaller parties, as the major parties would have their legislative ticket boosted by the presence of a presidential candidate.
Addressing some of these concerns, Su said the idea needed to be more carefully studied and called on politicians not to let political considerations influence their support for the proposal.
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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