Former premier Simon Chang (張善政), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) vice presidential candidate, yesterday accused the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of trying to win elections with smear campaigns and by avoiding a policy debate.
The DPP is “a party of organized rats” who excel at mudslinging and taking advantage of circumstances, Chang told a news conference at KMT headquarters in Taipei.
Citing a poll published yesterday by the Chinese-language United Daily News, Chang said that nearly 50 percent of voters think that the DPP often resorts to mudslinging and online influence campaigns to promote its candidates for the Jan. 11 presidential and legislative elections.
“There has never been so much mudslinging and negative campaigning for a presidential election,” Chang said.
“The reason is simple: The DPP has barely achieved anything worth mentioning in the past three-and-a-half years,” he said.
While he and Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the KMT’s presidential candidate, have worked hard to bring public attention to policy discussions and have continued to call for policy debates to be held, the DPP has never seriously responded to their request, Chang said.
Meanwhile, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said that if the poll is accurate, it would mean that “much of the mudslinging and misinformation against the government has been effective.”
In today’s world, disinformation poses a great challenge to national governance, she said, adding that Han’s campaign and supporters have been proven to be responsible for a great deal of mudslinging and misinformation over the past few months.
Separately, a picture provided by Han’s campaign office on Monday that appeared to suggest that the DPP has launched a smear campaign against him later turned out to have been created by a Han supporter.
The picture, which was clearly photoshopped, shows Han in bed with a woman, both nude.
Han’s campaign office had received information that the DPP was planning to spread false sexual accusations about Han some time this or next week, Han’s spokesman Cheng Chao-hsin (鄭照新) said when releasing the picture.
The supporter, surnamed Huang (黃), later on Monday said that he had made the image to show that the truth can be manipulated.
He did not collaborate with Han’s campaign office to create the picture, Huang wrote on Facebook yesterday.
Han’s campaign office spokeswoman Anne Wang (王淺秋) denied that the campaign team had mistaken the picture as evidence of a DPP smear campaign.
“It was not a mistake,” Wang said, adding that although the picture had been created as a reminder for other supporters, it had been circulated with malicious intent.
If people continue to circulate the picture online with the aim of defaming Han, she would take the case to the police, she said.
Additional reporting by CNA
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