My Take | Fractured pan-dems have method to their madness
To stop incoming leader Carrie Lam from succeeding on issues that matter more, they keep banging the drum for relaunch of political reform – something that has been ruled out by the central and local governments
Mainland honchos and their allies in Hong Kong have been going all out to dampen expectations that the incoming administration of Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor would relaunch electoral reform.
The latest is Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai, the former Legislative Council president and currently the only Hong Kong representative who sits on the standing committee of the nation’s parliament. She says such demands from the pan-democrats are impractical.
She is echoing a similar message from Wang Zhenmin, the legal chief of the central government’s liaison office here. Predictably, they are promptly blasted by the usual pan-democratic suspects. They could have saved their breath; the pan-dems and the localists are not being unrealistic or impractical – just the opposite. They, too, need to appeal to their “fan base” and keep the flame alive.
Everyone knows there is, for now, no hope of a possible compromise that could lead the way forward to universal suffrage. The central government has made it clear there will not be a better offer on the table after the last reform package was voted down in Legco. The opposition has vowed never to compromise on what they call “true democracy”.
The pan-democrats have been in complete disarray. That has made it possible for radical localists and secessionists to eat their lunch in the last series of district council and Legco elections.
