Taiwan’s James Soong: the perennial candidate ... and loser
The former Kuomintang member has run in most presidential elections since 2000
When James Soong Chu-yu announced last year he was going to run for the Taiwanese presidency, some bigwigs at the beleaguered Kuomintang might have lamented: Oh, come on, not again.
That’s because the participation of the 73-year-old once-popular KMT governor and present chairman of the small opposition People First Party has a history of sabotaging the century-old party by splitting the vote of the pro-unification camp.
In 2000, Soong’s defection from the KMT to run as an independent candidate for president enabled Chen Shui-bian of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party to narrowly win the poll.
Since then, Soong has never been absent from a presidential race.
In 2004, he served as the running mate of his former rival, KMT chairman Lien Chan, who was squaring off against Chen.
Were it not for a mysterious incident on the eve of the election in which Chen and his running mate Annette Lu Hsiu-lien were shot and injured, they could have won the presidency.
Chen beat the Lien-Soong ticket by just 30,000 votes, a result some analysts said was due to sympathy votes for the Chen ticket.