Legco election strategies hurt democracy cause
Regina Ip says the electoral strategies that played on people's fears and discontent brought victory for some, but ultimately left Hong Kong's democratic cause no better off
"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?" Voters face this question in every "first past the post" election. But in a system of proportional representation, where every faction can have a voice, political parties have figured out that a winner does not need to be the fairest. All kinds of candidates - the good, the bad, the ugly - can win, so long as he or she has clinched the minimum necessary to rise above the threshold.
Against this understanding, candidates for this year's Legislative Council election went into battle with strategies devised to leverage their strengths. All understood it is not enough to have high name recognition and even a high popularity rating as a lawmaker. A candidate must be able to mobilise their supporters: Get Out the Vote! - as campaign experts stress in Western democracies.
There are basically two broad campaign strategies to achieve this - mobilise your voters by making sure they love you or hate your enemy, or by way of a loyal, tightly knit ground organisation, or both.
This election bore witness to both strategies. The Civic Party decided to repeat its strategy of four years ago. By placing candidates with stronger popular appeal in second place on electoral tickets in New Territories West and on Hong Kong Island, the party hoped to be able to capture two seats each in both constituencies by mobilising sympathy votes. The strategy worked only partially. The party managed to parachute their newcomers into Legco, but not without the old guards losing their seats and the strategy cannibalising the votes for fellow democrats.
More significantly, supporters in the pan-democratic camp have learned that to rally their base, it is not enough to have an iconic candidate whom (hopefully) everyone loves to love or save. People's emotions can be stirred even more if they are shown something they fear or hate. The government's national education scheme played handily into this game plan.
Opponents of national education lost no chance to smear it as "brainwashing" and, soon, it became a metaphor for everything that is fake and rotten in mainland China, and what Hong Kong people, despite being part of the same country, have long sought to keep out.
Students with strong party connections went round chanting slogans forcing pro-establishment candidates to state their black-and-white opposition to national education. To maximise media coverage, students organised a hunger strike and sit-in at the government headquarters, pressing for a dialogue with the chief executive, and creating scenes of mass gatherings reminiscent of June 4.