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Voters plan to
‘punish Ma with their ballots’: survey
By Chris Wang / Staff reporter Staff reporter
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) could face
“the public’s punishment” in the seven-in-one elections at the end of next year,
as more than 60 percent of respondents in an opinion poll released yesterday
said they intended to “punish Ma with their ballots.”
In a survey conducted by Taiwan Thinktank, 62.6 percent of respondents said they
would use the elections to voice their opposition to the president’s poor
performance.
Only 26.5 percent of those polled disagreed with the idea, while 10.9 percent
declined to comment.
Meanwhile, a majority of the respondents expressed concerns about the
cross-strait service trade agreement, with 85.5 percent saying that they knew
nothing about the pact and 61.6 percent worrying about the potential impact to
the local service sector.
A total of 70.9 percent of the respondents said they worried that their jobs
would be affected by the agreement and 68.9 percent said the pact placed the
interests of large corporations above those of smaller businesses, the survey
showed.
Forty-four percent to 32 percent said that the trade agreements Ma signed with
Beijing since taking office have had more negative impacts than positive ones.
The perceived failure of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA)
“could be why people were unsure of the service trade agreement without knowing
much about it,” former National Taiwan University professor Chen Po-chih (陳博志)
said.
The poll also found that 78.9 percent of respondents did not believe the
government’s pledge that 80 percent of small businesses owners would not be
affected by the scheduled electricity rate hike next month.
A price increase before a comprehensive reform of the state-owned Taiwan Power
Co (台電) was unreasonable, 76 percent of the respondents said, with only 15.2
percent viewing the price rise acceptable.
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