While maintaining that the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) decision to change its presidential candidate is its own business, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweights yesterday said that the move would not help at all.
“The KMT’s decision to change its presidential candidate only a few months away from the election will have a negative impact,” said Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊), who doubles as DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) campaign manager.
She was referring to the KMT’s special congress on Saturday, that selected Chu as the party’s candidate for January’s presidential election and nullified the candidacy of Deputy Legislative Speaker Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱).
Photo: Lai Hsiao-tung, Taipei Times
“In fact, no matter who is the replacement, it will not change the fact that the public have suffered in the past eight years of KMT governance,” Chen said.
She said that it is more important for the DPP to listen to the public’s needs and come up with solutions, adding that “whoever is the KMT candidate is really their own business.”
Former premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), echoed Chen’s views, saying that the KMT’s decision is the KMT’s own “family business,” adding that “if they cannot even take good care of their own business, how can we trust them to handle the nation’s important issues?”
In response to media queries on KMT presidential candidate Eric Chu’s (朱立倫) invitation to Tsai for a debate, Hsieh mocked that “we have to first make sure whether Chu will stay on as the KMT’s presidential candidate.”
“It’s a good thing that we did not accept [former KMT presidential candidate] Hung’s debate invitation, otherwise we would have wasted the energy,” Hsieh said.
Chu is mulling a visit to the US as the KMT’s presidential candidate, Hsieh said it would not matter if he went to Russia, “because he’s just trying to catch up with what Tsai has already done.”
Former premier Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃), who was defeated by Chu in the last year’s New Taipei City mayoral election, was critical of Chu, calling him a “spoiled kid,” and accusing Chu of only being good at marketing himself via the media.
“Chu’s campaign strategy has always been to lie to the media, get elected, break his campaign promises, and then lie again in the re-election,” Yu said.
In response to media speculation on whether Yu would join the New Taipei City mayoral election again if Chu resigns to focus on the presidential election, Yu said that since he has been appointed by Tsai as the director of the campaign in New Taipei City, he would now only focus on getting Tsai elected and help the DPP to win a legislative majority.
The DPP’s New Taipei City council caucus demanded Chu resign and apologize over his previous promise that he would stay the full term as mayor.
Saying that it would not tolerate Chu taking a leave of absence from his mayorship to run in a presidential campaign, the caucus added that it would launch a recall motion against Chu if he plans to run for president while retaining his mayoral post.
Additional reporting by Lai Hsiao-tung
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