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進入《TAIPEI TIMES》 Lu confident of reaching the signature threshold required to run for president
Former vice president Annette Lu holds one of the government’s Double Ten National Day flyers at a news conference in Taipei yesterday. Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
By William Hetherington / Staff writer
Speaking outside the legislature yesterday, former vice president Annette Lu （呂秀蓮） said she is confident that she will gather the 280,384 signatures she needs before Nov. 2 to run as the Formosa Alliance’s presidential candidate in January’s election.
Lu made the comment during a news conference with her running mate, former Nantou County commissioner Peng Pai-hsien （彭百顯）.
Lu has set up offices across the country to collect signatures, and the public’s response has been enthusiastic, the Chinese-language online news site Newtalk quoted her as saying yesterday.
Her campaign team plans to begin collecting the first set of signatures later this week, she added.
Asked by reporters for an estimate on the number of signatures collected so far, Lu said there would be little point in guessing a number before she collected them, but she was confident she would reach the threshold in time.
She would provide a number by next week after the signatures are counted, she said.
Separately, Lu said she was dissatisfied with President Tsai Ing-wen （蔡英文） and Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu （韓國瑜） accusing each other of creating a “feeling that the country has been destroyed.”
Local media have taken to replacing the Chinese expression for this （亡國感） with the homophonic expression “dried mango” （芒果乾）.
This comparison is unsuitable, as giving people a sense that their country is being destroyed is lamentable, but dried mango is something that people enjoy, she said.
Lu questioned Han’s and Tsai’s failure to announce their running mates and asked whether the two were making secret exchanges.
A nation’s leader must bear the burden of ensuring national security and social stability, and putting the people’s minds at ease, she said.
“I am a third path outside of the pan-blue and pan-green camps, a middle ground for Taiwan,” she said. “I call on the people to stop letting themselves be restrained by the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] and the Democratic Progressive Party.”
新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES
