The Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) will have "writing a new constitution for a new Taiwan and a rectified name for the new country" as its campaign theme in the year-end legislative elections, a TSU official said yesterday.
TSU Secretary-General Lin Chih-chia (林志嘉) made the announcement after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said its campaign theme would be to end the influence of opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) in politics.
Lin said that although the TSU is an ally of the DPP, it will have its own campaign theme to solicit as much support as possible for the pan-green camp.
He said that the DPP was taking the right approach with its theme, while the TSU's theme of changing the national name and writing a new Constitution was aimed at raising Taiwanese consciousness and solidifying a sense of national identity.
TSU Legislator Cheng Cheng-lung (
Lin said that this is a priority, citing the example of the Kaohsiung City Council by-election as an example, saying that if the candidates of two allied parties attack each other, they can easily be defeated.
The TSU has nominated 27 out of a scheduled 29 candidates for the year-end legislative elections, Lin said.
The by-election in Kaohsiung, the last election battle prior to the legislative elections and widely seen as a litmus test of the strengths of the various political parties, saw the TSU gain three seats out of the 18 seats contested, while all four candidates of the PFP failed.
Despite the DPP being the largest party in the 225-seat legislature, the pan-greens currently lag slightly behind the pan-blue alliance.
Meanwhile, the TSU's central executive committee decided yesterday that Chairman Huang Chu-wen (
As there was only one candidate for the TSU chairmanship, the party decided not to hold a vote. Huang only needed to obtain support from more than half of the committee members in line with the party's regulations. Huang had unanimous support.
Huang has served as a legislator and as an interior minister.
With high confidence for good results in the year-end legislative elections, Huang predicted earlier this year that the pan-green camp would gain more than 55 percent of the legislature's 225 seats. If this were to happen, it could eliminate the opposition's blockade of bills proposed by the DPP administration.
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