Since former Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) chairman and Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was taken into custody while being investigated for involvement in a corruption scandal, polling by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation (TPOF) has indicated that public opinion of him has soured. However, the same cannot be said for the TPP as a whole, whose reputation has suffered only a minor setback.
According to TPOF’s poll, released Monday, 35.5% of respondents supported the DPP, 23.2% supported the KMT, and 12% supported the TPP. Compared to last month, public sentiment of the TPP has only fallen by 1.8%. This means only 13% of TPP supporters, or about 195,000 Taiwanese voters, have withdrawn their support since news of the scandal broke. Despite Ko’s predicament, more than 2.3 million people continue to support the TPP.
As for Ko himself, the survey took the public’s “emotional temperature” toward him as a political figure and found that 29% of those polled felt positively toward Ko, 33.7% felt neutral, and 32.1% felt negatively toward him. Compared to the results from their last survey in December 2023, Ko’s favorability has dropped by 11.5%. Based on these results, the overall sentiment of Taiwanese society toward Ko can be described as negative, suspicious, and disgusted.