Four years ago, when Chen Shui-bian (
Today, the DPP, the current ruling party, is going all out to fight the KMT's incumbent, Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who is seeking re-election.
From the president, the vice president and premier, to all party legislators and party cadres, everyone is coming out and taking turns attacking Ma over issues such as national identity, building a domed stadium, relocating Sungshan Airport, and whether Ma plans to run for president in 2004.
The result is that Ma's support ratings remain high in public opinion polls. The attackers have even unwittingly helped to raise Ma's campaign momentum, turning the mayoral race into almost a presidential race or a showdown between Chen and Ma.
The prospects of Lee Ying-yuan (李應元), the DPP's mayoral candidate, appear increasingly less promising.
According to media reports, the DPP seems to have realized the situation and the need to change its strategies quickly. In the next two weeks, the party plans to have Chen take a back seat and bring the focus of the lection back to city administration issues.
When it comes to Ma's political weak points, a mayoral election and a presidential election call for attacks on different levels.
In a mayoral race, his character, ability and performance should be the focus. Only in a presidential race should his political loyalty be questioned.
Today, the DPP is using presidential campaign methods to tackle Ma in a mayoral election. This turns him into a powerful enemy of Chen. When that happens, how will the lesser known Lee be expected to fight against Ma? The campaign will look like a showdown between "Mayor Lee" and "President Ma."
The DPP should readjust its focus and return to a comparison of Lee's and Ma's characters, abilities, achievements and vision in respect to the city's development.
Only when the DPP does so will it have any chance of salvaging Lee's opinion-poll ratings and his campaign momentum, neither of which seem to have seen any improvement.
Chen Sung-shan is a member of the Civil Service Protection and Training Commission at the Examination Yuan.
Translated by Francis Huang
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS