Tainan Mayor William Lai’s (賴清德) approval rating has reached 76 percent, leading 12 other political leaders in the nation, due to positive public reaction to his performance during rescue efforts following the magnitude 6.4 earthquake that devastated parts of Tainan, according to a recent poll.
Lai, who only had an approval rating of 39 percent in the previous poll conducted by local TV network TVBS’ poll center in September last year, ranked first among 13 of the nation’s political leaders, followed by Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊), whose approval rating increased by 12 percentage points from the last survey to 73 percent.
President-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) came in the third with an approval rating of 63 percent, which was also an increase of 12 percentage points.
Photo: Hung Jui-chin
All three are Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) members.
Popular but controversial Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) saw his approval rating fall by 3 percentage points to 57 percent to finish fourth.
Poll debutant Premier Simon Chang (張善政) finished fifth with a 54 percent approval rating, the highest among pan-blue politicians.
Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦), who just finished organizing this year’s Taiwan Lantern Festival, which saw record-high attendance, ranked sixth with a 48 percent approval rating, with Taichung Mayor Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) trailing by a small margin at 47 percent in seventh place.
Both Cheng and Lin are also DPP members.
Former deputy legislative speaker and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairperson candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) finished in eighth with a 45 percent approval rating, a decrease of 9 percentage points compared with the September poll.
Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全), the first DPP member in the position, ranked ninth at 44 percent.
New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) ranked 10th, following another consecutive decline in approval rating to 31 percent. Chu’s approval rating was 60 percent in 2014 and 41 percent in the September survey.
The last three political figures in the ranking were former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) at 26 percent, followed by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) with 24 percent and Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) with 20 percent. The poll marks the first time Ma’s approval rating has surpassed 20 percent since his second term started in 2012.
The survey was conducted by the TVBS poll center from March 1 to Friday last week, with 1,047 valid samples collected by telephone from people over the age of 20 selected at random nationwide.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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