Carrie Lam aims for personal touch at leadership campaign rally, vows to listen if elected
Leading contender in chief executive race looks to project image as healer of social divide at rally with business and political big guns
A leading contender in the coming election for Hong Kong’s highest office, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, on Friday went all out to reinvent herself as a candidate capable of healing the city’s social divide, at a star-studded rally featuring tycoons, but with pan-democrats conspicuously absent.
Lam, the former No 2 official who threw her hat into the ring for the chief executive race last month, also picked “We Connect”, with the catchwords “We Care, We Listen, We Act” as her campaign slogan.
She wore a T-shirt sporting the slogan, confident and smiling as she paced the stage with a microphone, in a set-up reminiscent of tech bosses’ product launches. The casual, chatty style she adopted contrasted sharply with her usual demeanour, which has been criticised as aloof and even arrogant.
“The team and I chose ‘We Connect’ because we know Hong Kong society is divided, lacks harmony and is stuck in a stalemate,” Lam told some 1,000 supporters who turned up for her election rally in Wan Chai on Friday.
“We must stay united and charge forward.”
But the limelight was partly stolen by her arch-rival in the race, John Tsang Chun-wah, who announced the result of his crowdfunding drive just hours ahead of Lam’s big show. The former finance minister, a rank below Lam when she was in government, raised over HK$1.3 million for his campaign in a day.