The poor showing of the Civic Party in the recent Legislative Council election is partly due to the emergence of the radical League of Social Democrats. The league's candidates never spared an opportunity to criticise the Civic Party for being a group of snobbish and hypocritical democrats.
But the attacks could not explain why Alan Leong Kah-kit only got 39,000 votes, less than the combined 45,000 received by the Democratic Party's Wu Chi-wai and the league's Andrew To Kwan-hang.
Nor does it explain why Ronny Tong Ka-wah ranked sixth on the seven-winner list in New Territories East and why the once-confident duo of Tanya Chan and Audrey Eu Yuet-mee made a desperate 'Save Audrey' call in the last week of the election.
I think there are two main reasons why the Civic Party has lost its glitter. The first is that this election was no longer mainly about democracy or freedom, the issues that had brought the Civic Party to fame. Democracy was a non-issue this time after the central government proclaimed a timetable for universal suffrage - 2017 for the election of the chief executive and 2020 for all Legco members.
Freedom is not presently at risk because the government has not announced any plan to reintroduce Article 23 national security legislation.
Second, given the changed circumstances, it was natural for the voters to focus on the candidates' track record of the past four years before deciding whom to support. This is where the Civic Party lost out to both the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) and the Democratic Party.