Heung Yee Kuk backs away from bloc vote for Carrie Lam in Hong Kong leadership race
Divisions within rural body emerge as kuk members meet chief executive aspirants Carrie Lam, John Tsang and Regina Ip
The head of the powerful rural affairs body, the Heung Yee Kuk, has backed away from earlier talk of making its members vote as a bloc for Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, the candidate seen as Beijing’s preferred choice in Hong Kong’s leadership election.
That throws the race further open without a guarantee of bundled voting for a single candidate by the kuk, which holds 26 seats in the 1,194-member Election Committee that will choose the next chief executive on March 26,
After meeting separately with Lam and two other contenders on Wednesday, kuk head Kenneth Lau Ip-keung said: “As far as nominations are concerned, I won’t make a conclusion for the time being.”
Last week, the kuk chief said his group was leaning towards using all its 26 votes to nominate the former chief secretary. The change of tack comes against the backdrop of Lam’s history with the kuk when she was the minister in charge of development and knocked heads with villagers over ending their housing rights in the New Territories.
While Lau insisted the pro-establishment kuk would still bundle its votes after reaching a consensus, one committee member said that would be “quite hard to achieve” because some did not want to nominate Lam. “We feel she may not really be Beijing’s preferred choice. It seems like Beijing hasn’t made a decision,” the kuk member said.