The Green Party-Social Democratic Party Alliance yesterday condemned the New Power Party (NPP) for breaking a tacit no-competition agreement as it protested the NPP’s nomination of a candidate for Taipei’s Neihu (內湖) and Nangang (南港) legislative district.
Before the NPP’s nomination of Terrence Lin (林少馳) for the Neihu-Nangang district, there was no overlap in the districts in which the parties had nominated candidates, as NPP founder Freddy Lim (林昶佐) earlier this year withdrew from the race for Taipei’s Daan District (大安) to make way for Social Democratic Party Chairman Fan Yun (范雲).
Alliance secretary-general Yeh Hung-ling (葉虹靈) said her party’s candidate for the district, Chen Shang-chih (陳尚志), had asked NPP officials before formally announcing his run if they intended to nominate a candidate for the constituency.
The NPP said that Lin would only serve as a “filler” candidate, who would campaign for legislator-at-large party votes without actively campaigning for representation of the district, which Yeh called unrealistic.
“We do not think the roles can be completely separated, particularly because Lin was already a candidate and it would be unrealistic to believe he will suddenly switch gears,” she said, adding that the nomination would also undermine the alliance’s efforts to win legislator-at-large votes in the district.
Yeh was also critical of remarks by NPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), who on Tuesday said the NPP would “fully support” any candidate from the pan-green camp who emerged after “integration” between Chen Shang-chih and the Taiwan Solidarity Union’s (TSU) Hsiao Ya-tan (蕭亞譚).
“It is outrageous that he would dare tell other parties to integrate,” Yeh said, adding that the alliance could not afford to drop even one of its 10 legislative district candidates.
Parties are required to have 10 legislative district candidates to be eligible for sets distributed according to party votes for legislators-at-large.
Lin — who last year served as a volunteer in the Appendectomy Project, a campaign to recall the district’s current legislator, Alex Tsai (蔡正元) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — said joining the party was a difficult decision because of the requirement that he stop campaigning for himself.
Winning an election is just one way of “raising civil consciousness” — the main goal of activists, he said.
Lin is the first “filler” candidate announced by the NPP, which only has six legislative candidates after yesterday’s withdrawal of Taichung candidate Ko Shao-chen (柯劭臻), who was trailing her TSU opponent in pan-green integration polls.
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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