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Voters to decide on a new Legislature in Taiwan

ROC Central News Agency

2016/01/15 20:45:57

Taipei, Jan. 15 (CNA) Besides electing a new president of the Republic of China, voters in Taiwan and its adjacent islands on Saturday will also decide on a new Legislature, the composition of which is far more uncertain but no less important.

A total of 556 candidates from 18 political parties are seeking to fill the 113-seat Legislative Yuan, 34 of which are at-large seats determined by votes cast for the individual political parties. Another 73 seats are regional, and the remainder are six indigenous seats.

The ruling Kuomintang (KMT) won 64 seats in 2012, compared with the opposition Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) 40 seats.

The DPP's goal in the legislative elections is to grab a majority, 57 seats, but its officials were not sure how close they are. Hung Yao-fu (洪耀福), the party's deputy secretary-general who is running its campaign, said it might garner 40-42 seats in the regional election and probably 13 seats in the at-large election, which is within the margin of its goal, the United Daily News reported on Thursday.

Some KMT sources estimated the party could get 40-53 seats in total, but there is a chance it will win fewer than 40 seats since there are many smaller parties competing with it in the at-large election, according to the United Daily News report.

Nathan Batto, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica's Institute of Political Science, said his subjective guess was 68 DPP seats and 35 KMT seats in his blog 'Frozen Garlic,' which is the literal English translation of the Chinese characters 凍蒜 (dongsuan) used to represent the southern Fukien or Taiwanese pronunciation of the Mandarin phrase 當選 (dangxuan) -- to be elected.

Batto said most people expect a somewhat smaller DPP majority, with the DPP in the low 60s and the KMT in the upper 30s.

A lot of uncertainty lies in the vote for the 34 'national and overseas communities' or at-large lawmaker seats, since there are 18 political parties joining the race, far more than the 11 and 12 seen in the previous two elections in 2008 and 2012.

Another reason is that only those parties that garner at least 5 percent of the total valid votes in the national legislative election can win such seats.

Some 18.78 million people are eligible to vote in the at-large legislative election, and considering the 2012 turnout of some 74 percent, the 5 percent vote threshold is about 695,000 votes.

Besides the KMT and DPP, only the Taiwan Solidarity Union and People First Party have gained at-large seats in the previous two legislative elections since the current system was adopted in 2008.

(By Tai Ya-chen and Kuo Chung-han)
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