President-elect Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) decision to retain her position as Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairperson after her inauguration threatens to perpetuate the presidency’s lack of accountability by stifling internal party dissent, civic campaigners said yesterday.
“Doubling as party chairman will allow the president to influence and control the legislature, by turning the majority party into an ‘echo chamber,’ worsening the current imbalance between the president’s authority and accountability,” said National Taiwan University law professor Chen Chao-ju (陳昭如), who serves as Taiwan Democracy Watch’s president.
Tsai last week went back on a pledge that she would not double as party chairman if elected, citing an “ongoing and changing political situation” and the DPP’s newly minted legislative majority.
Her decision followed a string of similar broken promises by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the DPP, both of whom said they would not continue to serve as chairmen of their respective parties if elected, only to later reverse themselves.
Chen said Tsai’s position as party chairperson would enable her to control both the legislative and executive branches without being subject to a “no confidence” vote, as is typical in parliamentary systems which combine the powers.
“It is really convenient, because she can still hide behind the premier while keeping a tight grip on party politics,” Taiwan Association for Human Rights vice president Chiou Wen-tsong (邱文聰) said, adding that the current constitutional system is imbalanced, as it allows the legislature to question the premier and not the president.
Taiwan Democracy Watch member and National Taiwan University professor of law Yen Chueh-an (顏厥安) said the party chairmanship would help Tsai control legislators-at-large, whose seats are contingent on their maintaining party membership.
District legislators are already vulnerable to executive branch pressure because of the need to secure funds for their districts, he said, adding that legislators only have the power to cut or freeze funding from the budget proposed by the executive branch, which forces them to cooperate to gain funding for pet projects.
Activists called for Tsai to voluntarily present reports to the legislature after being elected to help establish a constitutional precedent, while also calling for the passage of a exercise of presidential powers act to remedy the imbalance between the presidency’s authority and accountability.
They also called for revisions to the Act Governing the Exercise of Legislative Power (立法院職權行使法) to encourage debate, along with amendments to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) to remove requirements that legislators-at-large retain party membership.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the