Former government information office minister Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) is set to be nominated as the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) candidate for the Taoyuan County commissioner election in November after winning the party’s primary, the DPP said yesterday.
Cheng, 47, defeated former DPP legislators Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清) and Peng Shao-chin (彭紹瑾) in a public opinion poll conducted by the party headquarters on Wednesday by a significant margin, DPP Secretary-General Lin Hsi-yao (林錫耀) told a press conference.
Details of the survey, which pitted each aspirant against Taoyuan County Commissioner John Wu (吳志揚), who is to seek re-election, would be kept confidential as per the contestants’ wishes, Lin said.
However, Lin did reveal that Cheng trailed Wu by less than 10 percentage points and could be a serious contender in the upcoming race.
In 2009, the party hastily recruited Cheng to run for the commissioner’s seat with just 58 days to go until the election and though he put up a good fight, he lost, albeit by less than 50,000 votes, or 6.5 percent of the total ballots cast.
Cheng’s nomination for this year’s contest in Taoyuan, which is to be upgraded to a special municipality later this year, will be official after the party’s Central Executive Committee approves it, Lin said.
In related news, DPP Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智), one of the party’s four aspiring candidates for the Taipei mayoral primary, yesterday unveiled more of his campaign platform, proposing a new spatial plan that would relocate a number of government buildings in the city.
Yao, who has proposed closing Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport) and transforming it into a “grand central park,” yesterday suggested moving the Presidential Office to a site in Dazhi District (大直) originally designated for a Ministry of National Defense compound.
The area currently occupied by the Presidential Office could be transformed into a museum, he added.
Yao also proposed relocating the Legislative and the Executive Yuan compounds to the area currently occupied by the airport, saying the site is capable of housing at least 100,000 protesters, which would ease any potential impact to traffic caused by increasingly frequent mass demonstrations.
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