Do we like them?

Do we like Ko Wen-je?

Our score: 4 out of 10. A court-convicted first-instance verdict under appeal and a record of dismissive remarks sit against a fair stance on same-sex marriage rights and no sign of conspiracy-peddling.

Ko Wen-je came into politics from the operating theatre. He was an emergency and intensive care doctor at National Taiwan University Hospital who built a transplant team, and RFA reports he left medicine after an organ was mistakenly transplanted from an HIV-positive donor. His grandfather died in the 1947 massacre of civilians by Kuomintang troops.

He ran for Taipei mayor in 2014 as an outsider, won with a record-scale vote, then scraped back in 2018 by about 3,000 votes. In 2019 he founded the Taiwan People's Party and pitched it as a third option between the two big parties. By late 2023 he was polling level with the front-runners for the presidency, which makes the fall since then all the steeper.

The big story is the court case. On 26 March 2026 the Taipei District Court convicted him of accepting bribes tied to a property redevelopment while mayor, and of embezzling political funds from his 2024 run, and gave him 17 years. Ko denied any wrongdoing, calling it political reprisal and saying he would not surrender. The ruling was met with rallies from his supporters, and the DPP says it respects judicial independence.

It isn't over. Prosecutors appealed in April, arguing the court wrongly excluded evidence of an alleged NT$15 million bribe, and they want a heavier sentence. So the conviction stands for now but isn't final, and Ko is entitled to be treated as appealing, not as someone whose case is closed.

On the harm test, there's no campaign against LGBTQ+ people. In 2020 he said basic rights should not be decided by majority rule, though he'd also said he cast invalid votes in the 2018 same-sex marriage referendums, and critics say his stance wobbled over the years. After the 2024 election he rejected claims of large-scale voter fraud, which is the opposite of the conspiracy slide this page watches for.

Where he runs into trouble is his mouth. New Bloom catalogued remarks including suggesting that an industry with lots of women signals a downturn, calling unmarried women over thirty a national stability crisis, and body-shaming a female politician. The same outlet also reported he joked that Tibetan self-immolators did it because it was “trendy”. That is a critical outlet's account, but it's a pattern, not a single slip.