Letters to the Editor, December 17, 2013
I was surprised to read a quote from Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor ("John Tsang egged on at political forum", December 8). She is reported as saying, "Making policies under such circumstances, according to my experience, requires the government to have strong legitimacy.
"The strongest legitimacy, of course, would come from electing the chief executive using 'one man, one vote'."
Her assertion that the chief executive's problems have been created because he was not elected by one man, one vote is just factually incorrect.
There are numerous examples of heads of government elected by "universal suffrage" facing difficulty in governing but I will mention just two. First, not only is the US president facing difficulty, but his government was shut down for two weeks recently and his Congress has an approval rating of about 19 per cent.
The second example is Thailand's Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who has had to call for new elections after days of public demonstrations, with some raiding government offices and many demanding her resignation.
Both countries have lost many millions of dollars in gross domestic product as a result of these actions.