Public approval of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) performance has dropped to the lowest level since she took office on May 20, while that of Premier Lin Chuan (林全) remains below 30 percent, according to a survey released yesterday.
Tsai’s performance received an approval rating of 37.6 percent in the Taiwan Indicators Survey Research (TISR) survey, conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday, down by 0.8 percentage points from the previous survey.
The dissatisfaction rating reached 46.4 percent, an improvement from 48.3 percent in a previous poll, the survey showed.
The satisfaction rating was the lowest to date and compared with a 54.6 percent rating by the private survey company conducted in late June.
As for Lin, 28.7 percent of respondents said they are satisfied with the premier’s performance, up from 28 percent in the previous poll, while 48 percent said they are not satisfied, down from 53 percent.
Asked about the poll’s results, Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) said that “there are different public polls, but we will still take them all as references.”
The government will do its utmost to promote reforms to meet the high expectations of society, Huang said.
Since May 20, TISR has conducted surveys on the performance of the new government every six weeks through telephone interviews.
In the latest poll, 1,005 randomly selected people aged 20 or older were interviewed.
The survey has a margin of error of 3.1 percent.
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
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