Taiwan, December 07: Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, a propoenent of closer ties with China, ordered a review of weekend local election results that saw his party lose support as his own approval ratings fell, the party said on Monday.
Ma’s Nationalist Party (KMT) lost a county east of the capital to the anti-China opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Once robust support thinned in other cities and counties that voted in the first mid-term elections since the president took office in 2008.
“We need to discover and analyse the reasons that our vote tally came up short of ideals,” KMT spokeswoman Chen Shu-jung said. “We expect that the situation differs from one place to the next.”
Ma, also KMT chairman, ordered the party to collect information from the 17 districts that picked mayors and magistrates on Saturday to detect voting patterns.
The elections were widely seen as a test for Ma’s policy of engagement with Beijing, which has claimed sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan since 1949, when Mao Zedong’s forces won the Chinese civil war and Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT fled to the island.
Ma has eased tension with China by brokering negotiations on trade deals. He is expected to seek re-election in 2012 against a challenger from the DPP, which wants Taiwan’s formal independence from China.
Voters may have feared that a broad trade deal to be signed with China next year will affect their livelihoods or opposed the October lifting of a U.S. bone-in beef ban despite fears of mad cow disease.
Ma’s own satisfaction rating sank this month to 33 percent from 52 percent in May ahead of his first anniversary in office, according to a survey conducted by the United Daily News.
Opposition Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen, whose party has struggled since losing the presidency and legislative seats in 2008, enjoyed 45 percent public satisfaction this month, up from 27 percent in May.
The opposition said that its average score of 45 percent of the vote on Saturday was its highest in its 23-year history.
—Agencies