Vice President William Lai (賴清德) is expected to register tomorrow to join the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) nomination process for next year’s presidential election, inside sources said.
Lai, who is also chairman of the DPP, would submit his registration form — which was collected earlier by his aides — at the party’s headquarters in Taipei, sources said, adding that he would give a brief speech on his reasons for seeking the party’s nomination as its presidential candidate.
Registration for the DPP’s party primary opened yesterday and runs through Friday.
Photo: Taipei Times
The party primary ends on April 12, when the DPP is scheduled to announce its presidential candidate.
The DPP aims to complete the nomination process for its presidential and legislative candidates earlier than usual, a party insider said.
By doing so, all DPP members and candidates would be “ready for action” with regards to campaigning, and hopefully win back people’s trust while motivating the party’s traditional supporters, the source said.
A source close to Lai’s team said that the DPP would make detailed preparations and closely gauge shifts in the political landscape to account for all eventualities, such as if the presidential election comes down to a showdown between the pan-green and pan-blue camps, or if it is a three-way race involving the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) or another party.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and TPP are mainly seen as having overlapping supporters, but some opinion polls have shown that the TPP could take some of the DPP’s share of young voters, a source said.
“We believe TPP Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) will enter the presidential race, as he wants to attract more votes to boost support for the TPP’s legislative candidates, and to get more legislators-at-large,” they said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
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