Leading presidential candidate and troublemaking separatist Lai Ching-te sounds defiant in the last days of Taiwan’s election campaign.
Agence France-Presse reports (January 3, 2024):
The Taiwanese people “will resist” China’s attempts to influence the island’s January 13 election, frontrunner presidential candidate Lai Ching-te [shown above] told AFP on Wednesday as he hit the campaign trial 10 days before the pivotal poll.
Beijing claims the self-ruled island as part of its territory, and rejects the stance of Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party, which maintains that Taiwan is “already independent”.
Dubbed a “troublemaker” and a “separatist” by Beijing, Lai is up against two other candidates who have pledged closer relations with China if elected.
Lai’s two major opponents are the pro-appeasement candidates Hou Yu-ih of the Kuomintang and Ko Wen-je of the relatively new Taiwan People’s Party.
China has been using bribery, balloons, and fighter jets to try to get the Taiwanese to vote as Beijing prefers, which seems to be for Anybody But Lai. According to The Week, Taiwan is carefully noting China’s machinations and will issue a full report on them after the election.
Foreign Minister Joseph Wu says that if China succeeds in determining the outcome of the vote in Taiwan, “it will apply the same tactics to other democracies to promote its preferred international order.”
As of January 2, 2024, a tracking poll at The Economist website was showing that 36% of those polled plan to vote for Lai Ching-te, 31% for Hou Yu-ih, and 24% for Ko Wen-je. These will be the latest survey results on voter sentiment published until the election is over. As The Economist notes, “Taiwan does not allow new opinion polls to be published within ten days of the election on January 13th.”
