By Chris Wang / Staff reporter
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) did not reject a media report that said the party would conduct one-on-one polls that pair Wen-je (柯文哲) and DPP hopefuls with potential Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidates and that it would not nominate a candidate if Ko finished with better results than the DPP contenders.
Local Chinese-language media, including the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper), yesterday reported on the latest development, saying that the decision could be finalized in a meeting of the party’s seven-in-one municipal elections task force, which was initially scheduled for yesterday, but was postponed for today.
The mechanism, which would be different from a previous proposal of a “two-stage” poll, is expected to solve the longstanding dispute over the competition between Ko and DPP aspirants for pan-green camp support, since the pan-green camp would have almost no chance of defeating the KMT if it had two or more candidates in the Taipei mayoral election in November.
Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) remained the strongest critic of the party’s collaboration with Ko, saying that the DPP should “play by the rules” and nominate its own candidate.
Ko, a National Taiwan University Hospital physician whose support rate has been leading all pan-green camp hopefuls, said he would accept the mechanism.
Meanwhile, the DPP has suffered a defeat in a poll that compared its China policy with the KMT’s, losing in six of seven categories.
The DPP only fared better in its social policy, edging out the KMT 36.5 to 32.1 percent.
In the other categories — economic policy, policy implementation, attitude toward bilateral engagement, benefits for Taiwanese, stability and the general policy — the DPP lost to the KMT by between 5.9 and 20.1 percentage points.
On general policy, 35.2 percent of respondents favored the DPP’s policy, while 41.1 percent supported the KMT’s, according to a report made by the DPP’s poll center director Wu Hsiang-jung (吳祥榮) in a China Affairs Committee meeting yesterday afternoon.
Of those polled, 40.3 percent said that they found the DPP’s mentality of “opposing everything related to China” not acceptable.
The survey was conducted on Monday, Wednesday and yesterday and collected 1,433 valid samples.