Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智) has won the party’s first-stage primary for the Taipei mayoral election and will enter the second stage, in which he and independent hopefuls will compete for the final candidacy of the pan-green camp, the DPP said yesterday.
DPP Secretary-General Lin Hsi-yao (林錫耀) at a press conference yesterday morning announced Yao’s victory in a public opinion poll conducted by three institutions on Tuesday night, but did not release the poll results, citing a pre-survey agreement among the three contenders.
However, Yao’s office later released the final tally, which showed that Yao received an average support rate of 30.7 percent, beating lawyer Wellington Koo’s (顧立雄) 27.1 percent and Legislator Hsu Tain-tsair’s (許添財) 24.2 percent.
Photo: Fan Pin-chao, Taipei times
The survey, which pitted each contender against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate, former Taipei EasyCard Co chairman Sean Lien (連勝文), was the first part of a two-stage primary mechanism approved by the DPP.
Lien led every DPP hopeful in the three separate surveys — which collected 3,743 valid samples — with support rates from 38.5 percent to 41.7 percent.
For the second-stage primary, another public opinion poll to decide the final candidate is to be conducted before June 13 between Yao, National Taiwan University Hospital physician Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) — whose support rate has been leading all pan-green camp aspirants — and possibly Neil Peng (馮光遠), an award-winning screenwriter.
The DPP could organize debates between second-stage contenders before the public opinion poll is held, party spokesperson Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) said.
A three-member task force has established to handle the “integration talks” between Yao and Ko about a campaign platform, political values and follow-up cooperation after the primary is decided, Lin said.
The first-stage primary between DPP aspirants became a three-way race after former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) dropped out on Saturday.
After hearing the result, Yao said that he was surprised at how well he has done as an “underdog.”
Judging from past election results in Taipei, he has a chance at defeating the favored Lien as he is trailing by such a small margin with the election still six months away, Yao said.
“Again, I would have to say that the mayoral election in November will be a battle between the privileged class and ordinary citizens,” he said, referring to how he would campaign against Lien.
Koo, who finished second in the first-stage primary, said in a statement released yesterday that he pledged full support to Yao and would keep working for the people.
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