Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday said he could not imagine what the nation would be like if Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) becomes president.
Ko made the remark when asked if he thinks it would be hard to win next year’s presidential election if he runs against Han and President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
As presidential elections are processes of persuading people about the future, since Tsai is already the president, he could predict what the future would be like if she wins, but Han is totally unpredictable, so he cannot imagine what the future would be like if he wins, Ko said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Following the release yesterday of interviews Ko did with online news outlet Storm Media and Chinese-language weekly magazine The Journalist, reporters asked Ko why he said that Han lacks resistance to verbal attacks and that most of Han’s supporters are “losers.”
In the interview, Ko said that Han has become a spokesman for poor and underprivileged people, and that he agrees with former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator Lin Cho-shui’s (林濁水) view that Han’s supporters mainly consist of “dark-blue” supporters, local political factions and “losers.”
Ko said that Taiwan has a political culture of smearing and Han has been in politics for a long time, so there are many mistakes from his past that are subject to attack.
As for the “losers” comment, Ko said he meant that the “Han wave” is akin to throwing a match onto the gasoline of people’s frustration, just like the protests in Hong Kong against an extradition bill emerged from people’s long-term discontent toward the territory’s government.
Ko also spoke about his distrust of the DPP.
Starting in March 2016, the media started verbally attacking him on various issues, and in September 2017 after the Taipei Summer Universiade, he was convinced that he had been intentionally attacked by the state apparatus, Ko said.
The “last straw” was being accused by pan-green supporters last year of having been involved in organ harvesting in China, as the DPP had defended him on that issue in the 2014 election, he said.
Ko said that he went through difficulties negotiating with China without any help for Tsai to attend the Taipei Summer Universiade opening ceremony as president and for the crowd to hold the Republic of China flag, but he continued to bear verbal attacks.
If Tsai had done a good job as president, he would not have to consider running, he said, adding that Han and Tsai would be more difficult to defeat than the two mayoral candidates he defeated last year, so he has no chance of winning now, unless he develops an “atomic bomb” of a strategy.
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