Apologetic Hong Kong by-election loser Edward Yiu says pan-dems must explain confrontational Legco antics to voters

The most significant loser from Hong Kong’s opposition camp in Sunday’s Legislative Council by-election has urged his colleagues to plan better for the district council polls next year to bridge the divide with voters who denied them two out of four seats they were hoping to win back.

Former legislator Edward Yiu Chung-yim, one of the pan-democrats’ star candidates who lost in the Kowloon West constituency on Sunday, also conceded that his bloc had its work cut out to explain the rationale behind their political moves in Legco, which have been criticised as unnecessarily confrontational.

Yiu was candid about his shortcomings in an interview with the Post on Tuesday, a day after he became the first pro-democracy candidate to be defeated by a Beijing loyalist in a Legco by-election since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. 

Also joining the interview was pan-democrat Paul Zimmerman, who lost to another pro-establishment candidate in the architectural, surveying, planning and landscape functional constituency.

Their allies, Gary Fan Kwok-wai and Au Nok-hin, fared better and won seats in the New Territories East and Hong Kong Island constituencies respectively. 

Yiu was one of six opposition lawmakers disqualified and stripped of their seats for failing to take their oaths of office properly in 2016.

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Four of those seats were contested in Sunday’s by-election, which the pan-democratic camp had portrayed as a de facto referendum on the disqualifications, counting on a voter backlash against the establishment to regain lost ground.

It ended badly for them, with Yiu’s defeat in particular proving a bitter pill to swallow, as he lost to Vincent Cheng Wing-shun in a constituency that has long been an opposition stronghold.