Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) and independent Taipei mayoral candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) appear to agree on one thing: Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) meets “almost every condition to win.”
However, Ko said Wang was right only as long as the race plays out the way campaigns have in the past: a faceoff between the pan-blue and the pan-green camps.
Wang, a KMT member, has recently supported Lien’s campaign activities. The Chinese-language United Daily News on Monday reported that Wang was optimistic about Lien’s winning the Nov. 29 election, citing a Taiwanese proverb to describe the mindset of the city’s pan-blue electorate: “A child with a scabby head is nonetheless one’s own.”
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
The saying has been interpreted as meaning that although Taipei residents have been critical of Lien, as shown by various polls that found Lien lagging behind his independent rival, pan-blue voters, who make up a majority of Taipei’s electorate, would still vote for Lien because he is the KMT’s candidate.
Asked about the metaphor yesterday, Wang tried to downplay the issue, saying he did not “say it in public.”
However, he said that Lien has a higher chance of winning if the race returns to one that sees the two camps’ “basic base of support” (a ratio that has long been considered to be 6:4, with pan-blue having the larger proportion) going head-to-head.
“If [we] could return to the basic base of support, Lien has a greater chance of winning the election. As for the question of how, I believe that Lien’s campaign team will put effort into that. The changes that could affect the outcome before the election day are also worth following,” Wang said.
Meanwhile, Ko said that Lien could win the campaign if the idea is to divide the electorate along party lines, which is why Lien has been trying to frame the campaign in terms of the opposition between the pan-blue and pan-green ideologies.
“This mayoral election is one about choosing a direction in history. The question is whether we want to retreat to an ideological face-off between the two colors, or to pursue a new era of mutual tolerance and peace,” Ko said. “If we regress, [Lien] will win; if we progress, then I will.”
“I want a victory so residents can believe that there is more than blue-green opposition in Taiwanese society, that there is support for social justice, food safety, administrative efficiency and many other things,” he said.
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