This year’s elections have been marked by energy and youth engagement, members of an international delegation of election observers said yesterday.
The 18 members of the International Election Observation Mission were invited by the Taiwan Nation Alliance and International Committee for a Democratic Taiwan to observe electoral activities from Tuesday until tomorrow, before issuing a report evaluating the electoral process and conduct of political parties using international standards.
The delegation’s head, former US senator Frank Murkowski, said that in meetings with party officials across the nation, delegation members reported a prevailing spirit of enthusiasm and hope, citing activity by young people as the greatest different between this election and what he observed four years ago.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
“The involvement of youth — as opposed to the traditional types that we see often in polling places — is a little different than it was four years ago,” he said, adding that the “third force” New Power Party clearly represents “new power,” because its offices were located up four flights of stairs that only young people could run up and down.
University of Miami professor of political science June Teufel Dreyer said this election had the most excitement of any she had seen in Taiwan since beginning observations in the 1980s.
“There is much more of a feeling of anticipation that this is a watershed election, that you are on the verge of something very different for Taiwan; not only a possible alternation of political parties, but a possible realignment of the political system and also much more of a mood of ‘we can change things,’” she said.
Monash University emeritus professor Bruce Jacobs said he felt this election had proved quite calm and quiet in a continuation of trend which started during the last election cycle.
While part of the reason could possibly be ascribed to the relative lack of charisma among presidential candidates, the “routinization” of elections could also be a factor, he said, adding that prosecutors this election had proven eager to crack down on vote-buying.
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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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching