Academia Sinica president and Nobel laureate Lee Yuan-tseh (
"If Lee promises to become Chen's premier, my calculation is that he could swing between 5 to 7 percent of votes for Chen," Lin Chia-lung, a political analyst at National Chungcheng University said yesterday.
Lin said that, with around 15 million total eligible voters in Taiwan and an estimated turnout rate of 80 percent, the swing would translate into between 500,000 and 800,000 additional votes for Chen.
This, said Lee, would be decisive in the election.
"It would become the key factor in the election," Lin said.
Lin based his analysis on an opinion poll released yesterday which showed that 20.5 percent of respondents said Lee was the best premier, no matter who was elected as president.
Former KMT and Presidential Office Secretary-General Wu Po-hsiung (
The poll, sponsored and conducted by Ex International PR Consultants (
Wu was endorsed by 9.4 percent of Chen's supporters; 17.3 percent of Lien's; and 21 percent of Soong's.
Most recent opinion polls show that the support levels of all three major candidates are tied at around 25 percent.
About 25 to 30 percent of the poll respondents have been undecided or unwilling to give their preferences.
"Highly educated and younger voters are the bulk of those expected to swing with Lee," Lin said.
He added that if Lee endorses Chen, he is going to take more votes away from Lien than from Soong.
But if Wu is announced as Lien's future premier, Lin said, Soong is going to be hurt more badly than Chen.
It is widely rumored that Lee has been solicited by Chen to be his future premier, though the Nobel laureate has repeatedly said he is uninterested in politics.
Lin said he thought that only large-scale strategic voting -- where voters dump their favored but unlikely-to-win candidate and transfer votes to another in the hope of preventing the candidate they hate most from being elected -- would upset his calculations if a Lee endorsement for Chen were forthcoming.
"Lee is a well-respected scholar," said Joseph Wu (
"But it is not necessarily appropriate for good scholars with uncompromising principles to be thrown into the political arena. I have strong reservations for the idea."
"Real politics are sometimes dirty and to be premier would only be torture for Lee," Wu said.
"Without a majority in the legislature to back him up [if Chen is elected], I wonder how long he could stay on as premier if he did take up the post. It would only hurt him."
"Talk about installing someone like Lee as premier is a vote-getting tactic. It is a short-sighted campaign strategy," Wu said.
Prior to almost every Cabinet reshuffle in recent years, Lee's name has been touted as a possible premier.
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