Taiwan's Premier Cho Jung-tai visited opposition party legislative caucuses on Monday in a bid to drum up support for a US$12.6 billion special budget. On the docket are a series of response measures to U.S. President Donald Trump's 32% tariffs on Taiwan. But, Cho's visits come at a sensitive time in Taiwan politics, where rifts between parties are continuing to widen.
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00:00Taiwan Premier Zhu Rongzai is on a mission to get a 12.6 billion U.S. dollar special budget passed.
00:08Part of the money will be used to alleviate the effects of U.S. President Donald Trump's 32 percent tariffs on Taiwanese goods, which are on a 90-day hold.
00:18To get the cabinet's proposed budget passed, Zhu needs support from the legislature, a branch of government where the ruling Democratic Progressive Party does not have decisive power.
00:30On Monday, Zhuo visited opposition legislative caucuses to hopefully smooth things over so that both sides may come to an agreement.
00:50Both the opposition Kuomintang and the Taiwan People's Party seemed keen on providing the support Taiwan will need for the tariffs.
01:00But they also voiced concern over some items in the proposed budget plan that they believe
01:30related to the U.S. tariffs.
01:32In the content, we saw the government said that we don't only have money, but we have a lot of things that we want to do.
01:37Even with the money has a little bit of a deal.
01:39But we still want to emphasize that we have to provide high school teachers to help the poor people to help the poor people.
01:45On the other side of this tug of war between the ruling party and opposition lies another, much more contentious issue, lawmaker recalls.
02:01The DPP and KMT are trying to take down each other's legislators in a bid for control of the chamber.
02:08The KMT has now upped the ante, planning to begin a movement to remove President Lai Qingze on his first anniversary in office on May 20th.
02:18Those calls come after authorities raided several of the KMT's local offices after reports that KMT-affiliated recall petitions contained the signatures of dead people.
02:30On the same day as Zuo's visit, KMT Chair Eric Zhu once again called for the removal of President Lai.
02:37We want to make the movement of all kinds of ways.
02:43Let Lai Qingdea know that Lai Qingdea is the greatest power of Taiwan people.
02:49The DPP's response to Zhu came swiftly.
02:52The DPP's response to Zhu came swiftly.
02:54This is a delicate time for Taiwan.
03:16On one hand, the country needs to come together to have a unified response to Trump's tariffs.
03:22On the other hand, internal politics threatened to widen an ever-growing rift that could hamper progress on much-needed cross-party unity.
03:31Chris Ma, Scott Huang, Justin Wu, and Leslie Liao for Taiwan Plus.