Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) approval ratings remain high as he approaches 100 days in office, according to a poll conducted by Ming Chuan University.
More than 83 percent of residents surveyed were satisfied with Ko’s performance in poll results announced yesterday. A nearly unanimous 98 percent of pan-green camp voters were satisfied with Ko’s performance, compared with 70 percent of pan-blue voters.
In addition to overall approval ratings, the poll also surveyed city residents’ views of Ko’s performance on several prominent issues, with 87 percent of residents approving his handling of the removal or “improvement” of 226 cases of illegal construction and 79 percent approving his attitude in dealing with large corporations involved in city construction projects such as the Taipei Dome. Seventy-three percent of respondents approved of his pushing for affordable public housing, while 53 percent approved of his “frank” way of expressing himself.
The survey results drew a variety of reactions from Taipei city councilors.
Taipei City Councilor Wu Shih-cheng (吳世政) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) said Ko’s approval ratings were “frightening,” demonstrating that the “Ko Wen-je phenomenon” was a “tornado” ripping through Taipei’s political landscape.
He said Ko, an independent, had grasped the implications of the digital age more fully than the KMT, laying out and implementing policies closely reflecting online opinion, while swiftly changing course in response to criticism.
However, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) city council caucus whip Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) said she was “not at all surprised” by the results, given Ko’s status as a new “political star” still in his “honeymoon period” — before this year’s city council session opens on April 13.
“So far, the issues Ko has addressed have synced with the expectations of city residents toward the new administration,” she said, adding that Ko had “picked the right battles” in taking on corporations and back-door dealing, because these issues could attract support across the political spectrum.
However, with the result of investigations and negotiations over controversial city construction projects unclear and no budget yet approved for his new policies, Ko’s performance so far was “a lot of thunder with little rainfall,” she said, adding that city councilors across the political spectrum were “whetting their knives” to take a stab at Ko’s proposals.
“Ko faces the challenge of coming up with a stable majority coalition within the city council,” she said, adding that his ability to mobilize the city government’s bureaucracy to support his policies also remained unclear.
The DPP holds 27 of the council’s 63 seats, compared with 28 seats held by the KMT. Small party and independent councilors hold the balance.
The Ming Chuan University survey was conducted using random dialing and had an effective sample of 1,084 residents over the age of 20. It had a margin of error of 2.97 percentage points.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS