Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) endorsed Democratic Progressive Party presumptive presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday, saying that he had “full confidence” in Tsai and trusted her to lead the country.
The jailed former leader said he had no way to personally congratulate Tsai, who won the party primary on Wednesday, but had instructed his son, Greater Kaohsiung councilor Chen Chih-chung (陳致中), to offer Tsai his best wishes.
“I have full confidence in Tsai and I’m sure the Taiwanese people have even more expectations for this presidential candidate,” Chen Shui-bian said in a statement given out by his office. “I call on all my supporters, including the One Side, One Country Alliance, to back Tsai and help her become Taiwan’s first female president.”
Chen also praised former premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), who Tsai defeated in the primary, saying the cautious and restrained primary the two fought was a model “that would go down in history.”
Su endorsed Tsai immediately after the results of the official telephone polls were announced on Wednesday, calling on his supporters to back Tsai as she heads into the election.
“He set a model for sportsmanlike behavior with his ideas on ‘fighting, but not battling,’” Chen Shui-bian said. “The Taiwanese people will never forget Su’s political contributions in the past 30 years and his labors for Taiwan.”
He said he was concerned by the direction that President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration was taking the country, adding that Tsai needed to “re-establish homegrown governance to protect national sovereignty.”
“Only with Ma stepping down ... can the political butchering stop, can the Taiwanese take back their values of fairness, can a broken society start to mend and can the wrongly accused find redress and justice,” he said.
Chen Shui-bian is a polarizing figure within the DPP, but he can call on a large cadre of political supporters within the party. However, serving a 17-and-a-half year sentence for taking bribes and laundering money, the DPP has toed a fine line when dealing with him.
Tsai has fought to downplay his influence in the party, saying earlier in the primary that she would not make some of the same mistakes the former president had made, including on cross-strait and environmental policy.
She also remained mum on whether she plans to pardon the former president if elected.
Chen Shui-bian’s endorsement was the latest given to Tsai, one day after she narrowly took the DPP nomination, beating Su by only 1.35 percentage points in the official polls.
Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), pro-independence stalwarts as well as the DPP’s legislative caucus have also declared their support for Tsai, the DPP chairperson who is expected to end her leave of absence sometime after Wednesday.
“The DPP is full of confidence. We can win most of the popular vote and successfully complete the third round of political turnovers,” DPP spokesperson Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦) said of Tsai’s win in the primary.
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