Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) has lashed out at the KMT, accusing it of being conservative and submissive without a sense of right and wrong.
Lo, known for her outspokenness and audacity when confronting the KMT administration’s policies, said in an interview with the Chinese-language Apple Daily published on Saturday that if former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) “had taken [her] advice, the KMT government would not have been replaced.”
She said she opposed many of the KMT government’s policies and raised many eyebrows, with former KMT secretary-general King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) asking her to explain her stance to local party supporters.
“But the local supporters actually supported me. [The KMT officials] snubbed me and my advice; I could only blame myself for being well-versed in too many things, which allowed me to find the wrongs in their policies. And [later developments] proved me right,” she was quoted as saying.
Relying on supporters from either end of the political spectrum, be it blue or green, would not secure electoral victory for a political party, Lo said.
Rational, independent voters are the mainstay, she said, adding that “light-blue voters are more rational than light-green ones.”
A series of wrong policies by the KMT has scared away independent voters, she added.
“The KMT is conservative in its thinking, so is [KMT Chairwoman] Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱). They only want to be praised with nice words, so even when many people in the party know that a policy is not right, nobody dares raise an objection,” Lo said, according to the Apple Daily report.
“Party members are inherently submissive and have no sense of right and wrong, and if you do criticize, you are eradicated as an anomaly,” Lo added.
Commenting on the government’s performance after May 20, Lo said the KMT “knows nothing except hunting down people it wants to eliminate.”
Pension reform committee meetings at the Legislative Yuan were only a series of “brawls among groups,” and President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has failed to squarely face the problems regarding Itu Aba Island (Taiping Island, 太平島) and the cross-strait relationship, Lo said, adding that the government has brought many officials who were responsible for the Ma administration’s failed policies to the Cabinet, such as National Development Council Minister Chen Tain-jy (陳添枝) and head of Taiwan’s mission to the WTO Cyrus Chu (朱敬一).
“Even Feng Shih-kuan (馮世寬), who was the chairman of state-owned Aerospace Industrial Development Corp in 2008, when I had exposed that the company was involved in accounting fraud, has been invited to the Cabinet as Minister of National Defense,” she said.
The KMT government was defeated only after “Ma stopped listening to other people’s advice in his second term and put forward policies that were against the public will, but Tsai has been in office for only two months,” Lo said.
“What is to become of our lives?” she added.
Regarding the KMT’s performance as an opposition party, Lo said the Democratic Progressive Party’s obstructionism in the Legislative Yuan when it was in the opposition had been backed by the public and a reasonable rationale, but the KMT’s boycott, while pleasing the deep-blue supporters, might further alienate independent voters.
“The KMT cannot raise objections without justification. If this continues, it will be hard [for the KMT] to return to the presidency,” she said.
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