The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will hold opinion polls to select candidates for the Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung year-end special municipality elections this week, officials announced yesterday.
The polls, conducted randomly over the telephone, took place yesterday and today in greater Kaohsiung and the DPP expects to make the results public tomorrow.
In greater Tainan, polls will be conducted on Thursday and Friday, with the results being released on Saturday.
PHOTO: CNA
DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) decided last month that the nomination process for the two elections should be accelerated to prevent any further in-fighting among the party’s candidates.
Political advertisements in Kaohsiung have been banned since April 25 after the DPP’s two candidates, Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) and Kaoshiung County Commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興) accused each other of slander in a bitter row about damaging newspaper advertisements.
Chen Chun-lin (陳俊麟), director of the DPP’s poll center, announced that the party plans to make its selection for the two cities public on May 19, five days after it begins negotiations with prospective candidates.
Meanwhile, polls for prospective city councilor candidates will take place after May 17 in the order of Kaohsiung, Taichung, Tainan, Taipei and Sinbei. Chen said that he expects those polls to be wrapped up around June 10.
In related news, Chen Chu’s campaign office yesterday alleged that “someone” had masterminded the distribution of fliers discrediting Chen over the past few months.
Hung Chih-kun (洪智坤), director of the campaign office, told a press conference in Kaohsiung that they had found around 100,000 fliers to be distributed along with yesterday’s newspapers at 3am, clearly aimed at sabotaging Chen’s performance in the poll.
Hung said the fliers criticized Chen for being “fake,” while praising Yang as being a down-to-earth person. They also raised the issue of Chen’s health and its impact on her ability to do her job properly.
The mayor was hospitalized for a few days in April 2007 after suffering a minor stroke.
Although the fliers were printed by a local resident, Hung said he had his own ideas about who was behind the smear campaign.
He declined to confirm or deny that the “someone” he had in mind was Yang.
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