Leaders of small opposition parties yesterday made final appeals for their candidates ahead of today’s nine-in-one elections.
Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) Chairman Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝) joined the party’s Taipei city council candidates for last-minute canvassing, asking voters to consider the party’s candidates so that the pan-green bloc could hold a majority in the Taipei City Council.
The TSU nominated 41 city and county councilor candidates, seven borough wardens and four township mayors across the nation, with a unified theme of opposing cross-strait services trade accords.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
The party has also called on the government to stop centralizing power by re-evaluating resource distribution schemes, including by allowing autonomous local elections.
Industries monopolized by government-owned corporations should be opened to free-market competition, it added.
Huang said all TSU candidates have the same goal of being the people’s eyes on the government and helping their constituencies.
People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) has made frequent visits to canvass votes for his party’s city council candidates.
Soong urged voters to look past the traditional binary Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) mindset, accusing the KMT of being ineffective in its governance, while panning the DPP’s cross-strait policies.
People should urge the KMT into reforming itself by not voting for them, Soong said.
“If the KMT wins the elections, the government will continue the policies of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration, Soong said, adding that the viability of these policies is questionable and no head of state has had a popularity rating as low as Ma’s.
While the PFP, TSU and the New Party mostly nominated only one city councilor candidate per constituency in Taipei, the New Party made an exception in Shilin District (士林), where it nominated two candidates.
New Party chairman Yok Mu-ming (郁慕明) said that if all goes well, his party would have one representative in every constituency.
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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