A Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) poll showed yesterday President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) approval rating is down to 25.8 percent, the lowest score in the poll conducted by the party since Ma assumed office in 2008.
Ma’s approval rating is down 6.4 percentage points from an approval rating of 32.2 percent in a poll conducted by the DPP on April 2. The poll was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday with 1,303 voters and a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points.
This latest poll also showed that Ma’s disapproval rating is as high as 65.4 percent, DPP spokesperson Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) said at a press conference.
According to Lin, Ma’s approval rating has been dipping since March 5. After Ma announced on Tuesday evening the about-face in the government’s electricity rate policy which will now be implemented in phases, his support fell to its lowest, meaning the public disagreed with the policy, Lin said.
The poll also found that 68.9 percent of respondents said that despite the government’s revised plan to have more gradual electricity price increases, it still failed to curb increase it commodity prices.
The poll showed only 26.6 percent believed the adjusted policy would be effective.
On the DPP’s plan to stage a mass rally on May 19 to protest against what the party sees as Ma’s poor performance, the poll showed 57.9 percent said they support the rally and its demands that the Ma administration freeze fuel and electricity prices and keep the ban on beef imports containing the animal feed additive ractopamine, while 38.3 percent said they disapproved of the protest.
On the issue of banning US beef imports containing the animal feed additive, the poll showed that 75 percent said the government should keep the ban in place while 17.4 percent supported lifting the ban.
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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