Third Society Party

The Third Society Party (TSP; Template:Zh) was a Taiwanese political party headed by Template:Ill, a former DPP member.

Policies

The TSP declared that it will not support any of the candidates fielded by the Pan-Greens or the Pan-Blues in the presidential election of 2008.

The position of the new party on Taiwanese national identity was that the Taiwanese community, comprising the 23 million people in Taiwan and its outlying islands, was an independent and sovereign nation, with the Republic of China as its constitutional name.

History

TSP had called for establishment of the country's "eighth constitutional reform"—or the "third republic" constitutional reform—calling for a parliamentary system of government; single-member constituency and two-vote electoral system; the holding of a nationwide referendum on the content of a new constitution; and lowering the threshold to initiate constitutional reforms.

The new party, formally established in mid-July 2007, would field candidates in the next legislative elections scheduled for January 12, 2008, but it would not nominate any candidate for the upcoming presidential election, nor support the candidate of any party.

For the legislative elections, the party planned to focus on the second ballot, where a person votes for a party, rather than the first ballot for a candidate (referring to the voting process under the new "single-constituency, two-ballots" system, to be implemented in the January 2008 voting).

Thirteen people were on the first TSP list of potential legislative candidates, including Wu Rwei-ren (), an assistant researcher with Academia Sinica's Institute of Taiwan History, Lee Ting-tsan (), a professor with the Institute of Sociology, National Tsing Hua University, and also including scholars who were regarded as close to the DPP in stance.

See also

• List of political parties in Taiwan

External links

• Official website