Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) “will of course proactively” prepare to run for president after he steps down as mayor later this year, his wife, Peggy Chen (陳佩琪), said yesterday.
Chen, a pediatrician at Taipei City Hospital’s Heping Fuyou Branch, said on Facebook that she has noticed over the past few days that news and political talk shows on TV have been discussing Ko wanting to run for president in 2024.
“I do not know why it has stirred up heated discussion, because my husband has already said many times that he is preparing for it,” she wrote.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
“Not running in the [presidential] election would be news, and of course members of his own political party will support him, and his wife is no exception,” she wrote.
Ko won the Taipei mayoral elections in 2014 and 2018 as an independent, and founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in August 2019.
Chen said Ko had called her in September 2019 to ask her about her thoughts on him running for president in 2020, adding that he eventually decided against it, as he believed that some municipal tasks needed eight years to complete.
“After he steps down from his mayoral post at the end of this year, of course he will proactively prepare to run for president, or what else did you think?” she wrote, adding that running in an election is a citizenship right and whether an individual would get elected is another matter.
TPP Legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) has been another staunch supporter of Ko’s presidential aspirations.
“I, Tsai Pi-ru, am now 59 years old, and I ask for nothing for myself. My greatest wish for the remainder of my life is to send Ko Wen-je into the Presidential Office,” she wrote last week in a letter to TPP legislators, in which she invited them to a meeting on Friday to discuss election issues.
“This is why we formed the TPP in the first place. It is our greatest original intention, and this goal has never changed,” she wrote.
“To win [the presidential election] in 2024, [the local election in] 2022 is an important test... It affects chairman Ko’s path to becoming president as well as the future of the TPP in 2024,” said Tsai, who had worked with Ko’s medical team in National Taiwan University Hospital when Ko was director of the Department of Traumatology.
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
ALLEGED SABOTAGE: The damage inflicted by the vessel did not affect connection, as data were immediately rerouted to other cables, Chunghwa Telecom said Taiwan suspects that a Chinese-owned cargo vessel damaged an undersea cable near its northeastern coast on Friday, in an alleged act of sabotage that highlights the vulnerabilities of Taipei’s offshore communications infrastructure. The ship is owned by a Hong Kong-registered company whose director is Chinese, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. An unidentified Taiwanese official cited in the report described the case as sabotage. The incident followed another Chinese vessel’s suspected involvement in the breakages of data cables in the Baltic Sea in November last year. While fishing trawlers are known to sometimes damage such equipment, nation states have also
RSS