Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) is “incapable” of mapping out a vision for the country and is “inattentive” to the needs of the public because he is “obsessed with the struggle for power,” the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) said yesterday as they jointly sponsored a no-confidence motion.
The legislature later decided to hold a no-confidence vote in the premier at 9am on Tuesday after a plenary meeting to deliberate the motion on Monday.
There is little chance that the motion will succeed because that would require 10 to 12 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers to vote for it to meet the 57-seat threshold in the 112-seat legislature, depending on how two independent lawmakers vote.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
The People First Party, which has two seats, said that it would throw its support behind the motion to topple the administration led by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Jiang “in which people have lost confidence,” but that would make only a total of only 45 votes in favor.
Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) sees the vote as a chance to bring to an end to the executive and legislative impasse.
“If the motion of no-confidence fails, it would be unjustifiable for the DPP to continue its boycott [of Jiang’s policy address to the legislature],” Wang said.
Before the motion was tabled, DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) told a press conference at the legislature that the party took the action “on behalf of the people” because polls showed that 70 percent of the public consider both Ma and Jiang unfit for their positions.
Su urged all lawmakers to stand on the side of the people and to support the motion, regardless of their party affiliation, so that the voice of the people could be heard in the legislature.
“Let President Ma see how the people have judged him,” Su said.
Su said Ma calling the state’s top prosecutor to his residence to discuss a legal case with him and the disciplinary measures imposed on the legislative speaker in an attempt to oust him from office were things “that are not supposed to happen in a democracy.”
“[Those actions] have jeopardized constitutional order and political stability,” he said.
The political fallout sparked by the allegations made by the Special Investigation Division (SID) of the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office on Sept. 6 that Wang unduly lobbied for DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) in a breach of trust case has been characterized by the DPP as a “political vendetta” waged by Ma against the legislative speaker.
As a string of controversies surrounding the SID’s probe and attempts by the KMT, of which Ma is the chairman, to deprive Wang of the speakership surfaced, Jiang became involved in political gridlock.
The DPP has demanded that the premier apologize to the legislature for his role in the “vendetta” before he is allowed to take the podium and deliver his policy address, which Jiang has declined to do.
The KMT yesterday called a caucus meeting where lawmakers were told that they could receive the severest possible punishment — expulsion from the party — if they fail to vote against the motion on Tuesday, KMT caucus whip Lin Te-fu (林德福) said.
According to Article 3 of the Additional Articles of the Constitution, a vote on a motion of no-confidence shall be an open ballot.
KMT Policy Committee chief executive Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池) dismissed a rumor that Ma would ask some KMT lawmakers to secretly vote to support the motion so that he can invoke the his constitutional power to dissolve the legislature and call an election, whereby he would be able to consolidate his power over the party through the nomination process.
The Constitution stipulates that the premier must tender his resignation within 10 days of the legislature passing a motion of no-confidence and that he may request that the president dissolve the legislature.
Should the no-confidence motion fail, the legislature may not initiate another no-confidence motion against the same premier within a year.
The DPP-TSU motion claims there are seven major flaws with Jiang’s Cabinet, ranging from illegal wiretapping, backroom negotiations with Beijing on the cross-strait service trade agreement, a deceitful strategy to put the continued construction of the controversial Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s (新北市) Gongliao District (貢寮) to a referendum, among others.
Sources at the Executive Yuan said Jiang was mulling calling a press conference on Monday that would include all the members of the Cabinet to expound on what the Cabinet has achieved since he took over the premiership in February and to dispute the opposition’s charges.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
‘SIGN OF DANGER’: Beijing has never directly named Taiwanese leaders before, so China is saying that its actions are aimed at the DPP, a foundation official said National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) yesterday accused Beijing of spreading propaganda, saying that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had singled out President William Lai (賴清德) in his meeting with US President Joe Biden when talking about those whose “true nature” seek Taiwanese independence. The Biden-Xi meeting took place on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Peru on Saturday. “If the US cares about maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait, it is crucial that it sees clearly the true nature of Lai and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in seeking Taiwanese independence, handles the Taiwan question with extra
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
RSS