Taiwan Elections, no truth behind the shooting, yet

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Local Votes Lift Taiwan Leader's Policy
New York Times
By AP TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Taiwan's governing Nationalist Party won three out of five mayoral races in elections Saturday in the nation's biggest cities, ...

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Taiwan Elections May Hinge on China

Chiang Ying-Ying/Associated Press

Democratic Progressive Party Taipei mayor candidate Su Tseng-chang, center, greets supporters at a market in central Taipei on Fridayl.

By MICHAEL WINES

Published: November 26, 2010

BEIJING — Taiwan’s citizens will vote Saturday for leaders of its five biggest cities after a long campaign in which the issues — good governance, petty corruption, empathy with the average man — have not been just domestic, but often rigorously local.

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Sean Lien, son of former Kuomintang chairman Lien Chan, campaigning for Taipei county mayor on Friday.

But the nation’s overriding diplomatic issue, relations with the Chinese mainland, is likely to be foremost in analysts’ and scholars’ minds as they parse the results.

President Ma Ying-jeou has pushed hard for closer economic and political relations with Beijing. But his party, the Kuomintang, faces a surprisingly stiff challenge from the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, which is cooler to the idea.

Victory in a majority of the five contests, especially the race for mayor in the capital, Taipei, would give the opposition a platform from which to wage a pitched battle against Mr. Ma in the 2012 presidential campaign. The five contested cities — Taipei, Sinbei, Taichung, Kaohsiung and Tainan — together make up about three-fifths of Taiwan’s population.

“If we have major metropolitan elections go to a green majority” — the color of the Democratic Progressives — “that will significantly weaken the president’s power in conducting negotiations with China,” said Alexander Huang, a director of graduate studies in international affairs at Tamkang University in Taiwan.

“More important,” he added, “one of the new metropolitan mayors would be a quite natural future presidential candidate in challenging Ma.”

That would-be mayor is Su Tseng-chang, a career politician with the Democratic Progressives, who faces Mayor Hau Lung-bin in Taipei, which most analysts say is the closest race. The election is seen as crucial because the Taipei mayor’s post was the springboard to the presidency both for Mr. Ma and his predecessor.

Mr. Su, a former prime minister and his party’s 2008 vice presidential candidate, presents himself as a proven administrator with a common touch. Mr. Hau, the Kuomintang candidate, has struggled with a lackluster assessment of his performance in office; a recent poll by Taiwan’s CommonWealth Magazine ranked his approval rating at 21st of the nation’s 25 top municipal leaders.

Analysts say Mr. Su could be a formidable opponent in 2012 against Mr. Ma, whose popularity has slipped since late 2009, when his government bungled disaster relief in the aftermath of a typhoon.

On the election’s eve, news services reported late Friday that the son of a former Kuomintang chairman and government leader was shot in the face as he spoke at a suburban Taipei rally in support of a Kuomintang candidate for City Council. The shooting victim, Lien Sheng-wen, also known as Sean Lien, was reported to be in stable condition at Taipei Hospital.

The motive for the shooting was unknown. The Associated Press quoted a Taiwan television report as saying that a suspect apprehended by the police was nicknamed Horse Face, suggesting a link to Taiwan criminal gangs.

US hails Taiwan's key mayoral elections

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(AFP) – 20 hours ago

TAIPEI — A US envoy on Wednesday hailed Taiwan's mayoral elections, saying their peaceful outcome showed the island's democracy had matured despite the election-eve shooting of a campaigner at a rally.

Raymond Burghardt, chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan which handles civil contacts between the US and Taipei in the absence of official ties, made the remarks while meeting Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou.

"The way both parties handled that was also a sign of political maturity," Burghardt said, referring to the shooting which wounded Sean Lien, son of former vice-president Lien Chan, the state Central News Agency reported.

The Beijing-friendly Kuomintang won three mayoral positions out of five in Saturday's vote -- a result hailed as a victory ahead of 2012 presidential polls -- while the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) retained the other two.

The DPP complained that rumours over responsibility for the shooting might have affected the vote, but said it had accepted the outcome in any case.

Sean Lien was shot in the face while campaigning for the ruling Kuomintang party in Taipei county. A man in the crowd was hit by the same bullet and died on the spot, police said.

The suspected assassin, who was arrested immediately, later told police he had shot the wrong man, a claim reportedly rejected by Sean Lien.

Taiwan's Interior Minister Chiang Yi-hua has pledged to uncover the truth behind the shooting.

The attack raised memories of the mysterious election-eve shooting of then president Chen Shui-bian and his deputy in 2004, which plunged Taiwan into political chaos for months.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets, saying the shooting -- which slightly wounded both politicians -- had swayed the result. Chen went on to win a second four-year term by a razor-thin 0.22 percent margin.

His opponents the Kuomintang accused him of having staged the shooting to garner the voters' support, a charge he flatly rejected.