Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) on Friday urged the public to “protect democracy” and demonstrate their anger with President William Lai (賴清德) and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) via an assembly on Saturday next week as prosecutors’ probe into the main opposition party continues.
“It is rare in the free world to see a government that calls itself democratic launch such a reckless political purge against its opposition,” Chu said outside the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office.
“First, they targeted the Taiwan People’s Party. Now, they are coming after the KMT. First, the youth, now ordinary citizens. We will not allow the DPP to turn the judiciary into a weapon, dragging the entire society into fear and silence,” he said.
Photo: CNA
Speaking on the second night of protests outside the prosecutors’ office, Chu said it was everyone’s responsibility to gather on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office Building on Saturday next week to let Lai hear the public’s fury and disappointment over his alleged abuse of judicial power.
“All of us standing here and now share the same crime — opposing President Lai. Taiwan faces a crossroads for its democracy, and we must step up and combat dictatorship. Otherwise, Taiwan has no future,” he said.
Chu’s remarks came after prosecutors raided the party’s Taipei office on Thursday, detaining four staffers — including Taipei chapter director Huang Lu Chin-ju (黃呂錦茹) — for questioning over allegations that recall petitions they launched targeting DPP lawmakers contained fake signatures.
Prosecutors later sought court approval to detain the KMT staffers on suspicion of forgery.
At about 5am yesterday, the court ordered that the 75-year-old Huang Lu and Tseng Fan-chuan (曾繁川) be released without bail. However, the other two staffers, Chu Wen-ching (初文卿) and Yao Fu-wen (姚富文), were detained and held incommunicado.
The DPP has not responded to KMT’s planned assembly on Saturday next week, but in a statement on Thursday said that local election commissions found about 20,000 problematic signatures for recalls of its lawmakers, including 1,923 with signatures of dead people, accusing the KMT of being the biggest threat to democracy in Taiwan.
It also condemned the KMT’s protest outside the prosecutors’ office as “illegal.”
“It proves that the KMT is the biggest culprit who undermines Taiwan’s social stability and hurts the democratic constitutional system,” DPP spokesman Justin Wu (吳崢) said in the statement.
Chu, who embraced Huang Lu after the court hearing early yesterday, said the raids by prosecutors and the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau signaled the DPP’s attempt to eliminate the one force blocking the Lai administration’s realization of a one-party state.
He said there was a double standard, citing the discovery of about 100 allegedly fake signatures collected by a DPP-backed campaign to initiate a recall vote against then-Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) from the KMT in 2020, saying that prosecutors at the time did not even attempt to question those involved, claiming they could not proceed with the case.
“[The judicial system] obviously targets the KMT,” Chu said, adding that the Lai administration is “only one step away from declaring martial law.”
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