The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) added its second batch of 10 legislative candidates to its platform, it said yesterday, while Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who is the party’s chairman, said the TPP’s goal is to prevent any single party winning more than half the legislative seats in the presidential and legislative elections on Jan. 11.
The candidates, all under the age of 45, identify with “pushing the pan-blue and pan-green camps to the side to allow for the people to be in the center,” the party said.
Ko at a campaign event in Kaohsiung said that ever since he left his former job as head of traumatology at National Taiwan University Hospital to enter politics in 2014, many voters have told him that they support him because he could achieve what others could not in breaking the pan-green, pan-blue divide.
Photo: Wang Chun-chung, Taipei Times
By nominating TPP legislators, he said he wants to prove that they can gradually realize what others thought was impossible.
The TPP wants to change Taiwan’s political culture, he said, adding that its participation in the legislative election is a social movement toward achieving that goal.
Ko said the party would also nominate 34 people for legislator-at-large seats, and their goal is for no party to win more than half of the legislative seats, so that minor parties could play a significant role in leading Taiwan to break away from the long-term battles between the pan-blue and the pan-green camps.
The 10 legislative candidates announced by the TPP include: Yen Yao-hsing (顏耀星), a former National Assembly representative, who would run in Tainan’s first constituency; former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Kaohsiung delegate Ao Po-sheng (敖博勝), who would run in Kaohsiung’s eighth constituency; Chang Yue-jiang (張渝江), deputy chairman of Taichung Civil Engineers Association, who would run in Taichung’s fourth constituency; and Lee Min-wei (李旻蔚), daughter of Democratic Progressive Party New Taipei City Councilor Lee Hsu-tien (李余典), who would run in New Taipei City’s third constituency.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is aware that Beijing’s treatment of Hong Kong has weakened any possible sentiment for a “one country, two systems” arrangement for Taiwan, and has instructed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politburo member Wang Huning (王滬寧) to develop new ways of defining cross-strait relations, Japanese news magazine Nikkei Asia reported on Thursday. A former professor of international politics at Fu Dan University, Wang is expected to develop a dialogue that could serve as the foundation for cross-strait unification, and Xi plans to use the framework to support a fourth term as president, Nikkei Asia quoted an anonymous source
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