During a press conference Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Fai (費鴻泰) announced that he was ready to commit suicide if KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is not elected after KMT lawmakers intruded on DPP candidate Frank Hsieh's (謝長廷) Taipei campaign office.
What does this statement reveal? It shows KMT members do not really care about social order. Fai's statement shows that the KMT is not about maintaining and enforcing modes of relating and behaving. It is not about conserving social structures, institutions and practices. All that matters is to get the post, make Ma the president. It is all about the crown.
During the campaign, the KMT has tried to convince us that the increasing number of suicides is the result of the erroneous policies of the present government and that the new government and the new president can somehow fix it.
Fai's statement that he would consider suicide is nothing but a farce. A politician must be able to face the ups and downs of the profession he or she is voluntarily engaged in and must take full responsibility for his or her actions and words.
The lack of integrity shown by these KMT politicians casts doubts on whether a KMT victory would really be "a change that Taiwanese people should believe in."
Hanna Shen
Taipei
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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