More than 70 percent of Taiwanese believe that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) reform efforts should continue, even though they appear to be hurting her approval ratings, a poll released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) showed.
About 53.3 percent of respondents said the divided public opinion on whether reforms should be conducted was the reason behind Tsai’s declining approval rating, while 37.1 percent disagreed with such an interpretation.
Asked whether the government should continue its reform efforts if they are headed in the right direction, 70.6 percent of respondents said yes, and 23.2 percent said no, the survey found.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
As the poll was conducted to review Tsai’s performance during her first two years in office, it also asked respondents to name one area in which they thought her policy was the most satisfying.
Long-term care services was picked by 16.6 percent of respondents, followed by pension reform (15.7 percent), childcare services (8.7 percent), pay raises and minimum wage hikes (8.2 percent) and national defense and the construction of locally manufactured submarines (3.3 percent), the poll found.
A cross-analysis of the results showed that respondents’ level of satisfaction with Tsai’s performance in these five areas appeared to transcend their political affiliations, except for pension reform, which received support from 27.1 percent of pan-green camp respondents and just 5.6 percent from pan-blue camp respondents.
Asked whether they supported Tsai, more than half (54.9 percent) said yes, while 40 percent said no.
A breakdown of the numbers showed that Tsai’s largest support base is among people aged 70 or older, as 63.4 percent of respondents in the age group voiced support for her, followed by people in the 20-to-29 age group with 60.9 percent support.
People who had the highest level of disapproval were those aged from 30 to 39, with a disapproval rate of 46.3 percent, followed the 40-to-49 group (43.4 percent) and the 50-to-59 group (42.3 percent).
However, the numbers shifted when respondents were asked whether they were satisfied with Tsai’s performance, with 41.7 percent of respondents saying yes, and 48.4 percent said no.
The 70-or-older age group was the only one in which more people were satisfied with Tsai’s performance than were not.
As for those in the 20-to-29 group, 49.4 percent were not content with the president’s performance, compared with 37 percent who expressed the opposite view.
The poll was conducted on Monday and Tuesday and collected 1,020 valid samples.
It has a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift