Taipei (AsiaNews) – Taiwan's Vice President Annette Lu, whom the mainland has called "insane" and the “scum of the nation,” said on Tuesday that she was going to run for the presidency in 2008 and become the island's first female president.
Ms Lu, who belongs to President Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party, has however few chances of winning next year's elections. Many doubt she has even enough support to win her party's primary elections—which already includes three other solid candidates.
Moreover, she has repeatedly angered the Beijing government with her support for Taiwanese independence, and tensions with the mainland would probably rise if she were elected. For her “Taiwan is a Pacific country, not an affiliate of China.”
In China she has been called the “scum of the nation” but she has shrugged off the criticism, calling it "silly" and saying it only helps draw more global attention and sympathy to her cause.
Taiwan has been ruled separately from China after the Nationalists lost the civil war and fled the mainland before the victorious Communists in 1949. Beijing has insisted ever since that Taiwan must be reunified to the motherland “by any means.”