Mayor Ko continued to offer the most convincing platform for Taipei mayor, and possibly beyond as well.

The News Lens
Date: 2018/11/15
By: 破土 New Bloom

The televised Taipei mayoral debate broadcast last Saturday was, overall, a non-starter between the five current Taipei mayoral candidates. Three rounds of exchanges were conducted, consisting of an open statement, cross-examination, and closing statement. This was the only televised debate in which all five mayoral candidates were present, with Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) skipping one debate, and Kuomintang (KMT) mayoral candidate Ting Shou-chung (丁守中) skipping another.

However, no serious debate took place, with Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) mayoral candidate Pasuya Yao and Ting Shou-chung offering little political platform of their own, only criticizing the other on a few occasions, but instead mostly sniping at Ko. In this, Yao and Ting were occasionally joined by the other two candidates, Wu E-yang (吳萼洋) and Lee Si-kuen (李錫錕) – both fringe candidates, though decidedly more the former than the latter. Wu later became a viral phenomenon online for his odd behavior in the debate.

But in general, with Ko touting his achievements and shrugging off criticisms from Yao and Ting, one expects that there is no stopping the Ko juggernaut. It was quite telling that the debate began with Ko touting his mayoral achievements, with regards to restoring Taipei’s historic north gate, Beimen, renovating fruit and vegetable markets, and improving traffic, while also promising to tackle longstanding issues going forward, such as the high real estate prices faced by young people which make owning homes essentially impossible for them. As Ko’s improvements to Taipei infrastructure have been part of his major appeal to Taipei voters, one suspects that Ko could have coasted through on his achievements while making vague promises about the future.

Efforts by Yao and Ting to attack Ko for his shortcomings on infrastructure development were generally unsuccessful, particularly with Yao rather unconvincingly claiming that Taipei residents were disappointed with Ko. Yao would attack Ko for his inability to resolve the Taipei Dome debacle, and lack of progress on public housing projects, pulling out a vast array of posters, statistics, and images on placards as props. Yao also attempted to pin the blame for the Huashan Grassroots murder on Ko for allowing a group of “hippies” to apply for use of the space from the city government; ironic, given past attempts by Yao to look “cool” by going to Burning Man in Nevada.    [FULL  STORY]