The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) suffered a surprisingly large defeat yesterday in a presidential election that was expected to be a neck-and-neck race as DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) failed to keep President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) from winning a second term.
Tsai, who aspired to become the first female president in Taiwan’s history, garnered 45.63 percent of the total votes, while Ma received 51.60 percent.
At a post-election press conference, Tsai conceded defeat and offered her congratulations to Ma.
Photo: Shengfa Lin, Reuters
“I respect the decision of the people and offer my congratulation to President Ma. However, I urge him to listen to the voice of the people in the next four years and not to let the public down,” she said.
Despite the DPP making progress in terms of its share of the vote and the number of seats the party claimed in the legislature, Tsai said the result showed that the party has a long way to go in central and northern Taiwan.
Saying that she took full responsibility for the loss, Tsai also announced her immediate resignation as party chairperson, before making a speech to thousands of supporters outside her campaign headquarters in Banciao District (板橋), New Taipei City (新北市).
Photo: Shengfa Lin, Reuters
“It’s unfortunate we were not able to complete the last mile. We lost the election, but we also won something — solidarity and the determination to reform. The next DPP chairperson will keep the fire of reform burning,” she told supporters, who chanted: “Stay. Stay.”
Tsai called on her supporters to stick together because “someday, we will be back again.”
The loss was another blow to the party, which lost a landslide presidential election four years ago when its presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) only garnered 41.55 percent of the total vote against Ma’s 58.45 percent.
Photo: Shengfa Lin, Reuters
The 2008 loss came after the DPP’s historic victory in 2000 by then-presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), in which the party ended the KMT’s dominance and achieved the nation’s first transfer of power. Chen also won re-election in 2004.
Tsai was able to pull the party together and she started its journey back to being a competitive party with a number of by-election victories after assuming the chairmanship in 2008 en route to her nomination as the DPP’s presidential candidate in April last year.
She was able to pick up momentum as the campaign progressed with her campaign theme, which highlighted fairness and justice, as well as social and economic issues, such as income inequality and unemployment.
The DPP predicted Tsai would win by 1 percent, or about 100,000 votes, in the hotly contested election in its last survey before the election.
Supporters began to arrive at Tsai’s national campaign headquarters in a confident mood yesterday afternoon for an open-air rally, where a giant screen was set up so people could watch the live telecast of the ballot counting, which began at 4pm.
A few hundred people packed a small area inside the headquarters to watch the telecast. The crowd cheered when the initial vote count showed Tsai leading the national tally in the first few minutes.
However, the mood failed to last after almost every television station showed Ma pulling away and increasing his lead to more than 300,000 votes after about 30 minutes.
Watching the TV broadcast, a DPP aide said he was concerned about the share of the vote of People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜), whose share consistently stayed below 3 percent, about half of his support rate before the election.
“That showed that strategic voting has occurred as voters decided to ‘dump’ Soong and vote for Ma,” he said.
Another senior DPP aide, who had been monitoring the official Central Election Commission (CEC) real-time vote tally, said that the tallies shown on television did not reflect the official vote count.
According to the CEC, Ma did not pull his lead out to more than 3 percent until about 7pm, three hours after the beginning of the count, while almost all television channels showed that Ma was in the driver’s seat after the first 30 minutes.
Chuang Ruei-hsiung (莊瑞雄) and Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲), the hosts of the DPP’s rally, tried to pump up the crowd, but their announcement of the party’s legislative election victories in local constituencies failed to brighten the mood of supporters, most of whom stood silently in a light shower.
Some young DPP staffers and volunteers hugged each other, sobbing outside the party’s headquarters long before the outcome was announced.
Meanwhile, People First Party (PFP) supporters gathered at the party’s headquarter in Taipei and cheered in consolation for PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜), who lost his presidential bid and trailed far behind with 2.77 percent of the vote.
“Go, governor Soong. We are still proud of you despite the failure,” a supporter shouted.
Soong said he did not start considering joining the election until July or August last year, after feeling the need to speak out for ordinary people and improve their lives.
Soong said that his campaign lacked funds and he was thankful that the party was able to gather so many small donations from supporters.
“We accept the people’s decision,” he said.
Additional reporting by Shelley Shan
A Red Cross Society rescuer on Friday recalled the scene of a train crash in Hualien County, saying he could not believe what he saw: scattered body parts and the sounds of people crying in a crumpled train carriage. “It was a living hell,” said Lin Chi-feng (林啟豐), who led an 11-member rescue team that was among the first to arrive at the scene at 11:03am on Friday, carrying rescue and demolition gear. The fatal incident occurred at 9:28am when Taroko Express No. 408 crashed inside the Cingshuei Tunnel (清水隧道) after slamming into a crane truck near the tunnel’s entrance. The truck had
A survey of young Taiwanese showed that only 36.5 percent of men and 19.6 percent of women believe marriage is important, a trend that academics say is key to the nation’s low birthrate. Yang Wen-shan (楊文山), an adjunct research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology, yesterday announced the 12th round of results from a longitudinal survey of attitudes among young Taiwanese toward markers of adulthood. While few of the respondents, who were aged 28 to 32 when surveyed in 2017, found marriage to be important, 95.8 percent believed that being responsible for oneself should take precedence, data showed. Economic independence came in
SHRINKING FEMALE POPULATION: Last year, 107.74 boys were born for every 100 girls in Taiwan, which is a greater gender imbalance than in Japan and South Korea The Ministry of the Interior recorded 9,601 births in January, the first time the nation has produced fewer than 10,000 newborns in a single month, while different indicators showed that Taiwan might also be facing a population with increasingly fewer births, women and marriages. It comes after the ministry reported a record low 165,249 births last year, which was lower than the 173,156 deaths recorded last year. The nation experienced negative population growth for the first time last year, ministry data found. The number of births in January also dropped from a year earlier, when there were 12,510 births. In February, there were
The Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office has listed six people as suspects in a judicial investigation into a fatal train crash on Friday last week. Fifty people were killed and more than 200 were injured when the Taroko Express No. 408 train slammed into a crane truck that had slid onto the tracks near the entrance of Cingshuei Tunnel (清水隧道) in Hualien’s Sioulin Township (秀林). The office also summoned six officials at the Taiwan Railways Administration’s (TRA) Hualien Engineering Section for questioning about alleged illegal business operations and unsafe work conditions by Yi Hsiang Industry Co and Tung Hsin Construction Co, the two
RSS