Yesterday's election was billed as a must win for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), as an unfavorable result would raise the prospect of challenges to his leadership emerging in the pan-blue camp in the lead up to the 2008 presidential election, political analysts said.
The result -- retaining the mayoral position in Taipei but failing to challenge the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Kaohsiung -- did not provide the unambiguous result Ma needed, they said.
Taipei has usually been considered a pan-blue city, with two-thirds of voters favoring the pan-blue camp -- consisting of the KMT, People First Party (PFP) and the New Party -- in previous elections.
As electoral behavior in Taipei hasn't changed much in recent years, the KMT's re-election was predicable, said Liu I-chu (劉義周), a political science professor at National Chengchi University.
"Because we had candidates that were incapable of drawing voters from the other side, and a string of scandals had dissuaded swing voters from casting ballots, the election was basically determined by diehard pan-blue and pan-green voters," Liu said.
In this regard, the indicator needed to gauge how convincingly the KMT won Taipei was not Hau Lung-bin's (郝龍斌) level of voter support but the number of votes PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) obtained, said Chao Yung-mau (趙永茂), a political science professor at National Taiwan University.
According to the Taipei Municipal Election Committee, Soong garnered 4.14 percent of the vote, much lower than the party's 17.6 percent showing in the 2002 city councilor election and 17.11 percent it won in the 2004 legislative election.
`Dump-save'
The "dump save" tactic of the 1998 Taipei mayoral election -- in which the New Party candidate ran a distant third with 2.97 percent of the vote, one-tenth of what the party received in 1994 -- emerged again.
"The result will make KMT-PFP relations, which were already damaged due to their deep rifts ahead of the election, even worse," Chao said. "With Soong receiving few votes, the drag effect that PFP has been exerting on the KMT would be significantly reduced."
Liu shared a similar view, saying that the election had proved that smaller parties or independents have little chance of winning elections, especially in polls where only one seat is being contested.
"The PFP will be gradually weakened in the face of the 2007 legislative election, which is going to employ the single member-district, two-vote system,'" Liu said.
Considering this, Liu said the gauge of the KMT's victory this time should be the Kaohsiung mayoral election, which is also of significance to the party's development.
"At this time when the DPP's support rate is at an historically low, Ma needs to explain why the KMT was unable to beat DPP," said Chiou Chang-tay (丘昌泰), a former director of the Research Center for Public Opinion and Election Studies at National Taipei University.
Chiou said that while the southern city has been the stronghold of the pan-green camp, standard electoral behavior provides an insufficient explanation of the KMT's failure in Kaohsiung.
"The failure would surely pose a challenge to Ma's leadership of the KMT. On the one hand, Ma's acceptability in southern Taiwan is still questionable. On the other, failing to defeat a DPP embroiled in multiple troubles was a frustration to the KMT," Chiou said.
While Ma has been widely viewed as a shoo-in for the 2008 presidential election by pan-blue supporters, a small group of ethnic Taiwanese lawmakers are not so confident.
Lien-Wang ticket
About 30 lawmakers, who are on good terms with former KMT chairman Lien Chan (
"The DPP's election could provide encouragement to the KMT's pro-localizational faction, empowering them to make more demands of Ma on issues of concern to them," Chao said.
For the KMT as a whole, Chiou said the party should take it as a "warning."
"Over the past six years after losing power in 2000, the fact that Hau didn't garner as many votes as expected and KMT candidate Huang Chun-ying's (黃俊英) loss to DPP candidate Chen Chu (陳菊) suggests that the party hasn't extended its supporting basis through reform," he added.
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
BITTERLY COLD: The inauguration ceremony for US president-elect Donald Trump has been moved indoors due to cold weather, with the new venue lacking capacity A delegation of cross-party lawmakers from Taiwan, led by Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), for the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump, would not be able to attend the ceremony, as it is being moved indoors due to forecasts of intense cold weather in Washington tomorrow. The inauguration ceremony for Trump and US vice president-elect JD Vance is to be held inside the Capitol Rotunda, which has a capacity of about 2,000 people. A person familiar with the issue yesterday said although the outdoor inauguration ceremony has been relocated, Taiwan’s legislative delegation has decided to head off to Washington as scheduled. The delegation
Another wave of cold air would affect Taiwan starting from Friday and could evolve into a continental cold mass, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Temperatures could drop below 10°C across Taiwan on Monday and Tuesday next week, CWA forecaster Chang Chun-yao (張竣堯) said. Seasonal northeasterly winds could bring rain, he said. Meanwhile, due to the continental cold mass and radiative cooling, it would be cold in northern and northeastern Taiwan today and tomorrow, according to the CWA. From last night to this morning, temperatures could drop below 10°C in northern Taiwan, it said. A thin coat of snow
RSS