A “major defeat” in yesterday’s district council elections has left Hong Kong’s once seemingly impervious pro-Beijing camp in the unfamiliar situation of doing a spot of soul-searching today, something they have more or less successfully avoided even after months of increasingly violent protests against their domination of the political sphere.
Candidates opposed to the pro-Beijing government have won nearly 90 percent of the 452 district council seats up for grabs, signalling a decided rejection of the city’s pro-Beijing candidates, and by extension, Chief Executive Carrie Lam and her handlers on the mainland.
The tally was a massive blow for the pro-Beijing camp — which lost more than 240 seats in one night — and saw some high-profile electoral casualties along the way, such as fiery lawmaker Junius Ho, and Holden Chow, a prominent member of the city’s biggest pro-Beijing party the DAB.
Chow’s party held a press conference today to thank its supporters, and to apologize that it will no longer be able to represent them, adding that they would be reviewing their election strategies.
Chow was joined by DAB chair Starry Lee and other DAB heavyweights, who told reporters that of the 181 candidates the party fielded, only 21 of them won seats. Lee herself faced a challenge by prominent pro-democracy activist and former lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung, aka “Long Hair,” whom she managed to fend off by some 340 votes for a nearly 10 percent margin of victory.
DAB vice chair and lawmaker Horace Cheung, who also lost his district council seat, told reporters that Lee had offered to resign as party chairman over the defeat at the ballot box, but that the party’s central committee rejected it, saying the abysmal showing wasn’t just Lee’s fault, but rather “the collective responsibility of the party.”
“We hope that we will have a reflection and do much better in the coming challenge,” Cheung said. “Therefore, we unanimously decided that our chairwoman should remain as the leader of our party to face the coming challenge.”
Another prominent pro-Beijing group to lose big was the Federation of Trade Unions, who revealed at a press conference this morning that only four of its 62 candidates won seats, with chairman Ng Chau-pei describing the result as “not ideal.”
Ng blamed the electoral defeat on the “extremely unfair situation,” adding that the election took place under “black terror,” while attempting to put a positive spin on the crushing defeat.
He indirectly blamed the first-past-the-post voting system, telling reporters that the FTU won a total 180,000 votes — more than double the previous elections (though more than twice as many votes were cast overall) — adding that voters had declared their “political stances on the five months of riots with their votes.”
