President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has not enjoyed a “honeymoon period” after his re-inauguration, with the latest public opinion poll showing that the president’s approval rate remains a dismal 22.7 percent.
Ma’s approval rating has fallen 2.4 percent since the first Taiwan Mood Barometer Survey (TMBS) was released on May 11, according to Taiwan Indicators Research Survey, which conducts the bimonthly poll, which covers a range of economic and political issues.
The poll, conducted on Sunday and Monday, found that 67.1 percent of respondents disapproved of Ma’s performance and 36.3 percent said they were not happy with the president’s inauguration address on Sunday.
Only 16.7 percent of respondents said they agreed with Ma’s speech and 47.3 percent said they were not aware of what was said in the speech or did not answer.
Responding to a question asking who should be held accountable for a series of unpopular policies, including fuel and electricity price increases, capital gains tax on securities transactions and the relaxation of a ban on the import of US beef products containing the feed additive ractopamine, 41.9 percent of those polled said Ma should take responsibility. A total of 33.4 percent said that ministers should take most responsibility and 5.7 percent believed Premier Sean Chen (陳冲) was to blame.
According to the survey, Chen’s approval rate was lower than Ma’s at 18.4 percent, down 3.4 percent from the first survey, but only 28.4 percent of respondents said the premier should be replaced.
As to impressions of the political parties, 48.5 percent of respondents said they did not favor the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), while the Democratic Progressive Party’s negativity rate went down from 41.9 percent earlier this month to 36.1 percent.
The poll collected 1,025 samples and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
‘HUMILIATING’: Aletheia University students called on the school to apologize for limiting former professor Chang Liang-tse’s access to its Taiwan literature archive The Aletheia University Student Association yesterday called on the university to apologize to retired professor Chang Liang-tse (張良澤) after it prevented him from accessing the Taiwanese literature archive at its Tainan campus by changing the lock on the building. Last month, the university changed the lock on the building without warning, barring Chang’s access to the archive that he had “singlehandedly established,” Chung Yen-wei (鍾延威), the son of the late writer Chung Chao-cheng (鍾肇政), wrote on Facebook on Friday. The university in 1997 created the first department of Taiwanese literature in the nation, and Chang, now 82, was the department’s first-ever chairman,
ALLEVIATING FEARS: The CECC would only announce public places where it is difficult to identify everyone there at the same time as the couple, minister Chen said The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday announced six places where two locally infected COVID-19 cases had visited between Thursday last week and Sunday, urging people who had been at the places at the same time to monitor their health. The couple, cases 838, a doctor, and 839, his nurse girlfriend, were reported by the center on Tuesday. The doctor had treated a patient with COVID-19 last week before he began suffering symptoms on Friday, while the nurse began suffering symptoms on Saturday. They work in the same hospital in northern Taiwan, but the nurse had not worked with COVID-19 patients, so
SECOND RULING: Israeli-American Oren Shlomo Mayer refused to sign a court transcript, complained about the court translator and said the trial had been unfair The High Court yesterday upheld New Taipei City District Court’s verdicts on four men convicted last year in connection with the 2018 murder and dismemberment of a Canadian citizen on the banks of the Sindian River (新店溪). It found American-Israeli Oren Shlomo Mayer and American Ewart Odane Bent guilty of homicide and the abandonment and destruction of a corpse, with Mayer sentenced to life in prison and Bent given a term of 12 years and six months, for the death of Sanjay Ryan Ramgahan, whose body parts were found in a riverside park under Zhongzheng Bridge in New Taipei’s Yonghe
A lawyer and a prosecutor yesterday castigated what they called a lenient ruling by the High Court on Luo Wen-shan (羅文山), whose prison sentence was reduced to two years, which he does not need to serve, after he was convicted for receiving illegal political donations from China to meddle in Taiwan’s elections. Investigators found that Luo, who retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant general, had accepted NT$8.38 million (US$294,604 at the current exchange rate) under the guise of political contributions from Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member Xu Zhiming (許智明) and people in Hong Kong from 2008 to
RSS