At the Taiwan polls, social media-savvy daughter turns her outsider father into KMT’s brightest hope

From Kuomintang outsider to the man who broke the Democratic Progressive Party’s grip of more than two decades on Kaohsiung, new mayor Han Kuo-yu is enjoying the spotlight and he owes much to his daughter, Coco Han, for that success.

Coco, a 23-year-old senior university student who majored in sociology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, campaigned for her father on the streets and behind the scenes, prompting some to draw parallels with Ivanka Trump’s role in helping her father, Donald, to the US presidency.

Coco managed social media accounts for her father’s election campaign and, when Han’s victory was declared at the weekend, she said she would “lend my father to Kaohsiung”.

“I finally got to sleep for eight hours,” she said after the polls. “I will go back to continue my studies and hope Han will work hard, and not disappoint people’s expectations of him.”

Kaohsiung was a traditional stronghold for the DPP, which was chaired by the self-ruled island’s pro-independence President Tsai Ing-wen before the election. Han, who vowed to make the city rich enough to stop young people from going to Taipei for jobs, became a figurehead for the defeat of the DPP.

During the election campaign, Coco Han was busy like her father, visiting and shaking hands with Kaohsiung residents from street to street, attending television shows, answering questions from reporters, building her father’s social media campaign and winning over supporters.