Taiwan Statebuilding Party member Li Yu-chen (李雨蓁/Li U-chin) has announced that she’ll be running for a spot on the Kaohsiung City Council out of Fongshan District.

Li ran for the same position in 2018 where she received 7,729, however this only amounted to 3.78 percent of the vote and she was not elected. This year she will be running again alongside a fair number of other pan-Green candidates for the 8 available spots in Fongshan.

Huang Jie, who was elected in 2018, will also be running in Fongshan. However, unlike last time, she will be running as an independent instead of with the New Power Party.  The DPP will also be running 4 candidates. 3 of these are running for reelection: Chang Han-chung (張漢忠), Chen Huei-wun (陳慧文), and Lin Chih-hung (林智鴻). The fourth candidate will be newcomer Su Jhih-rong (蘇致榮).

This may create some animosity of between some of those on the pan-Green side of this election being that there are so many running. Though if the high level of support for Chen Chi-mai is maintained, it is highly possible that pan-Greens will take more than half of the 8 seats.

However, it is still possible that the high number of candidates results in pan-Greens splitting the ticket and more Blue leaning councilors getting elected. This is a good reason for Taiwan to enact ranked-coice, or preferential, voting. This would remove any issue of “spoiler candidates” and would also allow for more 3rd party candidates to have a chance at election without people fearing that they’d be throwing their vote away.

As the election grows closer, we will see if Li’s support has grown since the last election. If elected, the TSP candidates could potentially inject fresh perspectives into the city government as they possess far fewer institutional resources from which to coast on, and thus must rely on actually going out into the community to get votes (generally speaking). With 14 candidates confirmed to be running so far, it’s certain to be a hotly contested race.

Speaking of the TSP they recently headed a small rally in Kaohsiung to show solidarity with Ukraine.