New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) won a second term yesterday, with a narrow victory over his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) challenger, former premier Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃), by a razor-thin margin of 959,302 votes to 934,774, or 50.06 percent of the vote to 48.78 percent
Although Chu has retained his mayoral post and his stock looks set to rise in the KMT’s senior hierarchy, the closeness of the result nevertheless came as a surprise to most political observers.
In the near future, Chu could be a force to be reckoned with and a major influence in the party, because he is the only KMT member to hold on to his municipality.
GRAPHIC: TT
Initial numbers from exit polls had both the KMT and DPP camps on the edge of their seats. Yu went in front in the early results, then it was Chu’s turn to go ahead as the lead changed several times.
The tight race proceeded through the early evening with no clear winner, as poll results trickled in from the 12 electoral districts in the nation’s most populous municipality.
Chu began to grab a narrow lead just before 7pm and he held on for the victory with the results announced after 9pm.
However, Yu almost snatched victory from Chu, a mayor widely seen as having considerable support among the electorate, and with the resources and the organizational advantages of being the ruling party in New Taipei City.
When the race began, Yu knew he had to fight an uphill battle, as most surveys had Chu possessing a large double-digit lead. Besides tabling well-received urban renewal and housing policies to redevelop the municipality, in the final weeks Yu narrowed the gap by advocating food safety and consumers’ rights.
He received a lot of support from civic groups and local communities after targeting the food scandals of the past few years, particularly by seeking compensation for consumers by launching a class-action lawsuit against Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團), the food conglomerate which was involved in several of the adulterated food scandals and which was alleged to have made a large profit by benefiting from a land rezoning deal in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重). Yu criticized Chu for approving the deal.
By comparison, in the 2010 New Taipei City mayoral election Chu had prevailed over DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) by a margin of 1,115,536 votes to 1,004,900, 52.61 percent to 47.39 percent.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS