My Take | Opposition have reached end of the road
- Facebook post from jailed pan-democrat Raphael Wong suggests victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat in the endgame, but he is dangerously hoping against hope
Some people like to compare politics with chess. Raphael Wong Ho-ming, the jailed former chairman of the League of Social Democrats, recently posted a Facebook message comparing his fellow pan-democrats to chess pieces on the losing side. I assume he was thinking of Xiangqi or Chinese chess rather than international chess.
No matter; either game would work in his analogy. He is on the losing side, he wrote, and there are only limited moves available. Written in prison, it’s a melancholy post, almost poetic. I am afraid my translation won’t do him justice:
“Are we not pieces on a chessboard? While we cannot be completely manipulated, the moves available to us from our positions on the board are limited.
“With some moves, we thought we had won. For example, our victory with the 2019 district council election should have been followed by the Legislative Council election.”
Wong was referring to the opposition’s landslide election wins in 2019, which they had expected to repeat the following year.
But the government cited the public health threat of the Covid-19 pandemic and postponed the Legco election until next month.