Three nascent political parties have agreed to put forward a joint list of priority bills as a shared plank in their platforms for next year’s legislative elections in January before determining whether to cooperate in candidate nominations to avoid vote-splitting, Green Party Taiwan co-convener Lee Ken-cheng (李根政) said yesterday.
Lee said he is in agreement with Social Democratic Party (SDP) convener Fan Yun (范雲) and New Power Party founder Freddy Lim (林昶佐) after an informal talk on May 17 that the three parties would campaign under a list of bills that they see as high-priority in the legislature.
“We understand that people would like to see us join forces, but the Green Party Taiwan needs to have the issue go through our internal procedure,” Lee said. “Cooperation among third-party forces would begin with priority bills.”
The newer parties have been at odds over whether they would have a joint legislator-at-large lineup and whether they, along with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), would support individual candidates in certain constituencies.
Both the SDP and the Green Party Taiwan have rejected the possibility of talking the DPP into abandoning campaigns in some districts where the two smaller parties have candidates vying for seats.
Fan last month said that the SDP would not be content to simply acquire seats in the legislature, because it wanted to bring a breath of fresh air to national politics.
“The Green Party Taiwan has never considered negotiating with the DPP in this regard,” Lee said yesterday. “If the DPP wins the presidential election, there must be some political parties that can fulfill the duty of the opposition in the legislature.”
When the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was an opposition party, it did not raise objections over environmental concerns to a DPP administration-backed proposal that Kuokuang Petrochemical Technology Co construct an integrated refining and petrochemical complex, Lee said, adding that the proposal was later shut down.
“The Green Party Taiwan would fulfill the duty of an opposition party,” Lee added.
Unlike the SDP and Green Party Taiwan, the New Power Party has been in talks with the DPP about fielding a single candidate in some constituencies, for example Hsinchu City, it said.
Meanwhile, New Power Party legislative candidate Hu Po-yen (胡博硯) last week abruptly withdrew from the party, reportedly over its relationship with the DPP.
The episode is expected to have further bearing on potential interparty cooperation.
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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