Taiwan yesterday swore in its 11th Legislative Yuan, 113 lawmakers running the gamut from 10-term mainstay Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) to Huang Jie (黃捷), the legislature’s youngest member at 31.
The new legislature, which is to remain in office through 2028, has no single party holding an absolute majority.
The main opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) holds 52 seats, in addition to two KMT-aligned independents, while the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has 51.
Photo: Ann Wang, REUTERS
The Taiwan People’s Party, with eight seats, will therefore hold a crucial swing vote.
The incoming lawmakers consist of 54 new members and 59 returning incumbents. Forty-seven of them are women (42 percent) and 66 are men (58 percent). The average age of members in the new legislature is 53.
Of the total, seven members, or 6 percent, are aged 70 and above; 17, or 15 percent, are aged 60 to 69; 58, or 51 percent, are aged 50 to 59, and 20 members, or 18 percent, are between the ages of 40 and 49.
Only 11 lawmakers, or about 10 percent, are aged 40 or younger, the youngest of which is 31-year-old DPP lawmaker Huang.
In terms of electoral performance, Tainan-based DPP
Legislator Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) received the highest vote share of any lawmaker in the Jan. 13 election, winning 76.54 percent of the total ballots cast.
Meanwhile, the KMT’s Hung Mong-kai (洪孟楷) of New Taipei City won the most overall votes in the election, with 158,586, while the KMT’s Chen Hsueh-sheng (陳雪生) of Lienchiang County (Matsu) was elected with the lowest number of votes — only 3,118.
Now in his 10th term, the DPP’s Ker remains the legislature’s most senior lawmaker. He first became a lawmaker during the second Legislative Yuan in 1993.
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