Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu, who was clearly a frontrunner has been re-elected with almost 53 percent of the vote in a three-way race, defeating independent contender Yang Chiu-hsing and KMT candidate Huang Chao-shun with an overwhelming margin.

Chen scored more than 821,000 votes, which is more than the total obtained by Yang and Huang combined. In her speech last night, Chen expressed her gratitude to the public, and for the people who believe in the value of Kaohsiung.

At 7:30 in the evening, Kaohsiung City Mayor Chen Chu announced that she won the first mayoral election after the merger and upgrade of Kaohsiung City as she had won more than 750,000 votes, which is half of the votes of Kaohsiung city and county.

Besides expressing her gratitude, Chen also thanked her opponents for proposing many good political platforms and promised that she would adopt them.

At the same time, Yang Chiu-hsin, who left the DPP to run the election, conceded defeat with teary eyes.

Nominated by the KMT, Huang Chao-shun scored the least votes.

But she continued her effort to express gratitude toward her supporters while apologizing to them.

Although facing defeat, both Huang and Yang promised to keep up their promises of serving for Kaohsiung residents.