Independent Legislator Freddy Lim (林昶佐) yesterday survived a recall election in Taipei’s fifth electoral district after the tally of votes in favor of the recall fell short of the required threshold.
With 235,024 people eligible to vote yesterday, Lim would have been ousted if one-quarter of them, or 58,756, had backed the recall motion and if more voters were in favor of the recall than against it.
In the end, 54,813 voters supported the recall initiative, or about 56 percent, while 43,340 opposed it, according to unofficial Taipei City Election Commission figures for all 218 polling stations.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
Voter turnout was 41.93 percent, not high enough to reach the number of votes needed to oust Lim from the Legislative Yuan.
The push for a recall followed a local COVID-19 outbreak that began in May, with Wanhua District (萬華), which Lim represents, at the center of the surge.
Lim was criticized for siding with the central government rather than his constituents when an official tried to absolve the central health authorities of responsibility for the outbreak by saying that it originated in Wanhua (萬華).
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Lim also took heat for appearing with central government officials at a Huannan Market (環南市場) news conference after an outbreak there and was accused of showing little concern for the market except at election time or for a photo op.
Lim, 45, was re-elected as an independent to a second legislative term in 2020 with 81,853 votes and a margin of victory of 3 percentage points.
As a New Power Party candidate in 2016, he won his first term as legislator with 82,650 votes and a margin of victory of 4 percentage points.
Before becoming a politician, he gained fame as the lead vocalist of the metal band Chthonic and was known as an advocate for Taiwanese independence.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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