Fri, Aug 28, 2015 page3

• Radical Flank to participate in legislative race

  • By Abraham Gerber / Staff reporter
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  Members of the pro-independence Radical Flank (基進側翼) yesterday announced that they would participate in next year’s legislative elections, seeking to add a southern voice to the “third force.”

  “Because of the long-term imbalance in the development of the north and south, the voice of young people in the south has been absent from the ‘third force,’” Radical Flank Chairman Chen Yi-chi (陳弈齊) said. “Running [for legislative seats] ourselves or searching for any possible cooperation that will serve to help overturn the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) are both options.”

  Headquartered in Kaohsiung, the group was founded by a core of left-wing activists who studied together in Europe, with the formal organization taking shape as a result of members’ participation in last year’s Sunflower movement, he said.

  

  Radical Flank party secretary Liu Che-chia, left, Chairman Chen Yi-chi, center, and Central Standing Committee member Huang Chien-lung hold a press conference yesterday in Taipei on donations to political parties.

  Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times

  “The Radical Flank is the only newly established party that has electoral experience,” said Huang Chien-lung (黃建龍), a member of the party’s Central Standing Committee, adding that the party’s candidates posted the best overall results among smaller parties in last year’s nine-in-one elections.

  The group fielded five city council candidates in Kaohsiung and Hsinchu. None of them were elected, with candidates on average receiving 5.5 percent of the vote in their multi-seat constituencies, Radical Flank said.

  “Given our experience, we have the opportunity to play a definite role in this election, in part by providing help in winning votes south of the Jhuoshuei River (濁水溪),” Huang said.

  The river runs along the boundary of Changhua County and Yunlin County.

  A clear “anti-KMT” stance would be the premise for cooperation with other parties, Chen said, adding that the party’s main objective is to mobilize “deep-green” voters dissatisfied with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), while influencing “third force” parties to support independence.

  “As far as we are concerned, both the blue and green political camps have problems, but the blue camp is a ‘poisonous apple,’ while the ‘green’ camp is only ‘rotten,’” he said.

  There is no way the party would accept a political stance that criticizes both camps equally, he said.

  As long as other parties agreed with Radical Flank’s principles, it could “agree to disagree” on specific policy positions, he said.

  The group’s political stance appears to put them closest to the New Power Party (NPP) among major “third force” parties.

  Integration talks between the NPP and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and Green Party Taiwan broke down last month, with the NPP saying that the major issue of contention was whether to support DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文). Several NPP candidates have since taken campaign photos with Tsai.

  According to a poll released yesterday by the Chinese-languge Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper), support for the NPP and the Green-SDP alliance falls short of the 5 percent threshold of total votes needed to win at-large legislative seats. The poll placed NPP support at 1.3 percent, while the Green-SDP alliance had 0.46 percent.
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