Analysis: Taiwan's Vice Presidential Candidate Picks
On the last day left to register their candidacy, all of Taiwan's presidential candidates and their running mates have now registered. But who are Taiwan's vice presidential candidates and what do they mean for the race?
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00:00 Could you tell us about the new VP picks that have been announced today? Who are they?
00:04 So from the TPP, Kowen Je's vice presidential pick is Cynthia Wu. She's currently a legislator with the TPP.
00:11 She comes from a very sort of wealthy background from the Xinguang group,
00:16 which if you're in Taiwan, you've seen all the Xinguang Sanyue malls around the country.
00:20 She herself is actually, was originally a dual citizen in the United States, but gave up her citizenship
00:26 when she joined the party list with the TPP back in 2020. So she is of the TPP establishment.
00:33 I think she gives credibility for still relying on his own party, and I think that will most
00:38 certainly help his base of support going forward. When it comes to Zhao Xiaokang for Hou Youyi,
00:43 it's a very interesting choice because Zhao is kind of unabashedly pro-unification. He's
00:48 been very outspoken about his views for a long time. He's even one of the founding members of
00:53 Xinguang, the very pro-unification political party here in Taiwan. So his selection as vice
00:59 presidential candidate tells me that the KMT is, instead of trying to appeal to moderates,
01:04 they're going back to their original deep blue base of support with the hope that this really
01:08 sort of rallies the KMT voter base around their candidate now.
01:12 So what do these new picks mean for the race?
01:14 I think for certain, it really puts a big pause on any sort of KMT-TPP cooperation when it comes
01:22 to district races. I think a big question people have had is whether or not, even if presidential
01:27 candidates don't cooperate, whether or not we'll see party cooperation kind of farther down the
01:32 ballot. And these vice presidential candidates, I think, are so qualitatively different from each
01:37 other in their politics that I think it's only going to make cooperation more difficult,
01:41 especially combined with the spectacle that we saw yesterday. I think the idea of really any
01:46 sort of blue-white cooperation is really going to be stalled. And now we've got all of the,
01:51 you know, presidential pairings named. Could you tell us a little bit about how the race
01:58 landscape looks and what people will be voting for, who will they be choosing between?
02:02 So it's going to be really important to sort of follow public opinion for the next couple of weeks
02:06 because it's going to tell us a couple of things. First, of course, how are these vice presidential
02:13 candidates helping their respective campaigns? But also whether or not the debacle we saw
02:17 yesterday is going to hurt Kuh or Ho. Even though I think as international observers,
02:23 we look at yesterday and we have a chuckle over just how messy that presser was,
02:28 I think for their bases of support, they're still going to vote for those candidates. And I think
02:33 we would be quick to assume, or we would be wrong to assume that their base of support will stop
02:38 supporting them just because of yesterday. So I think it's important to really follow how public
02:42 opinion changes over the next couple of weeks in combination with the vice presidential picks
02:47 and yesterday's presser.
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