Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and independent commissioner candidates romped to re-election yesterday, with wide margins of victory for incumbents making the east coast counties of Hualien and Taitung counties exceptions to the pan-green wave that swept most of the nation.
Independent Hualien County Commissioner Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁) won twice as many votes as KMT challenger Tsai Chi-ta (蔡啟塔). He won 56.53 percent of the vote, up from 56.4 percent in 2009.
The election result was a resounding victory for Fu after his application to rejoin the KMT was rejected earlier this year.
Fu was expelled from the KMT when he stood for election in 2009 without party approval.
Fu’s campaign attracted special interest because his wife, Hsu Chen-wei (徐榛蔚), also registered to stand as a candidate for commissioner, in a move widely viewed as “insurance” against the emergence of court verdicts barring him from standing for re-election. Despite their separate candidacies, the husband and wife campaigned as a team, sharing a single headquarters and appearing together in advertisements.
Hsu’s candidacy mirrored her previous appointment as vice commissioner when Fu was first elected, for which purpose the couple temporarily filed for divorce before the appointment was declared illegal by the Ministry of the Interior.
Fu has been shadowed by lawsuits related to stock market speculation throughout his term.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) did not field a commissioner candidate in Hualien County, with DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) saying earlier this month that her party lacked adequate support to launch a viable challenge. The DPP has struggled to make inroads with the Hakka and Aboriginal constituencies who comprise about two-thirds of Hualien’s voters.
Taitung County Commissioner Justin Huang (黃健庭) of the KMT also trounced his opponent, DPP Legislator Liu Chao-hao (劉櫂豪), in a rematch of the previous election. In 2009, the race was one of the closest in the nation, but yesterday Huang expanded his share of the vote to 54.41 percent, up from 52.6 percent.
The DPP fared better in Yilan County, where DPP incumbent Lin Tsung-hsien (林聰賢) defeated his KMT opponent Chiu Shu-ti (邱淑媞) and expanded his margin of victory, winning re-election with 63.95 percent of the vote, compared with 54.2 percent in 2009.
Police have issued warnings against traveling to Cambodia or Thailand when others have paid for the travel fare in light of increasing cases of teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people being tricked into traveling to these countries and then being held for ransom. Recounting their ordeal, one victim on Monday said she was asked by a friend to visit Thailand and help set up a bank account there, for which they would be paid NT$70,000 to NT$100,000 (US$2,136 to US$3,051). The victim said she had not found it strange that her friend was not coming along on the trip, adding that when she
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
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
RSS