Premier Yu Shyi-kun and the pan-green legislative caucuses yesterday urged the pan-blue camp to concede its election loss, but the pan-blue legislative caucuses said they would appeal their case to get justice.
Yu said that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
PHOTO: CHEN TSEH-MING, TAIPEI TIMES
Yu made the remarks in response to reporters' questions when he appeared at the Legislative Yuan to take questions from the lawmakers.
"The pan-blue camp cannot provide the court with enough evidence to prove that the ruling party cheated in the election, and the verdict has cleared the names of the ruling party, President Chen Shui-bian (
"The pan-blue camp should also consider the nation's unity and the people's welfare. Although they did not concede right after the elec-tion, they should at least act like Gore, who did not agree with the US Supreme Court's verdict but still accepted the outcome, Yu said.
He said that Lien and Soong were willing to see the nation divided and unstable for more than seven months in order to retain their hold on their parties.
The Justice Alliance faction of the DPP released a poll yesterday showing that 68.9 percent of the public thought political parties should accept the Taiwan High Court's verdict yesterday, and that 55.2 percent of respondents did not support the idea of Lien and Soong persisting with appeals.
The alliance said that after analyzing the figures, it found that 32 percent of the pan-blue supporters did not support an appeal.
The survey was conducted by a polling company; 1,080 people were interviewed by phone with a 3 percent margin of error.
"If the pan-blue camp wants to appeal its case, it should believe in the independence and impartiality of the judiciary, otherwise it doesn't make sense to appeal," said Wu Ping-jui (吳秉叡), a former judge and a DPP legislative candidate.
"If it wants to appeal but also accuse the DPP of manipulating justice at the same time, it may be creating a space for protest in case it loses the appeal," Wu said.
However, the pan-blue camp questioned the DPP's survey results and said that and while US President George W. Bush's team was a gentlemen's team, Chen's team was made up of frauds.
KMT caucus whip Huang Teh-fu (
"How can a frauds' team compare to a gentlemen's team? A-bian should stop trying to deceive the public," Huang said.
"There are serious flaws in Thursday's verdict, so we have to appeal. But justice is justice, and this won't affect the legislative election campaign," Huang said.
Huang also said the pan-blue camp was not showing doubts about the judiciary.
"We just think that there is too much political interference with the justice system, but we also saw a light in yesterday's verdict. The Taiwan High Court ruled that it was illegal to put the referendum together with the presidential election, and that the shooting did change the election environment," Huang said.
Huang's remarks, however, didn't accurately reflect the verdict. The court said that combining the referendum with the election might have been illegal, according to the Referendum Law (公民投 票法) but it did not violate the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Law (
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