Several civic groups yesterday released a top 10 list of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) “unfulfilled campaign promises” from an online poll conducted at the end of last month.

“It’s been more than 1,000 days since Ma took office on May 20, 2008, and he has only a little more than a year of his term in office left, so it’s about time for us to look at what he’s done and what he has not done,” Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), convener of the Alliance for a Fair Tax Reform, told a news conference in Taipei.

To see what people care most about, the alliance — along with other civic groups such as the Taiwan Women’s Link, the Taiwan Labour Front, the Association of Taiwan Journalists, the Alliance for Social Housing — listed 23 of Ma’s unfulfilled campaign promises and put it to an online vote last week.

Among the 23, Ma’s failure to keep his promise of lowering the unemployment rate to below 3 percent received the highest number of votes — nearly 3,000.

It was followed by his promise to make real-estate prices “reasonable,” with 2,030 votes. A pledge to lower the number of working hours came in third at 1,976.

In 2008, when Ma took office, the unemployment rate was 4.14 percent; it rose to 5.85 percent in 2009 before dropping to 5.21 percent last year — but it was still far from his promise of 3 percent. As for the number of working hours, the average per month was 183.9 hours in December 2007, which increased to 191.7 hours in December last year.

“This is really a slap in Ma’s face because the top three unfulfilled promises that people care most about are all economic issues and Ma’s major appeal to voters was that he would lift Taiwan’s economy,” Taiwan Labour Front secretary-general Son Yu-lian (孫友聯) said.

Other unfulfilled campaign promises include having at least one-third of Cabinet positions filled by women, taking aggressive steps to build social housing projects and creating Aboriginal autonomous regions on a trial basis.

“So many people casting their vote online shows that people are getting impatient about government inefficiency,” Taiwan Women’s Link secretary-general Tsai Wan-fen (蔡宛芬) said. “There’s a little more than one year of his term left, he should work harder to fulfill his promises and come up with some real deals.”

The groups also announced the beginning of an online “Taiwan Ma Government Exposition” to follow up on the unfulfilled campaign promises until the end of his term at examine2011.pixnet.net/blog.