Hong Kong's new generation: 'Umbrella soldiers' and NeoDemocrats big winners in district elections
Occupy-inspired youngsters and rising stars from NeoDemocrats the big winners, Post study finds
Nearly one in four votes cast in favour of pro-democracy groups in the district council polls on Sunday went to two unconventional segments: the dozens of Occupy-inspired fresh faces as well as the rising NeoDemocrats party, a South China Morning Post study has found.
But the new faces collectively known as the “umbrella soldiers” – an insignificant brand in local politics until the Sunday polls in which they won 15 per cent of all pro-democracy votes – are not expecting a linear path to growth. It will be an arduous trek to the Legislative Council in next year’s polls, with some sceptical of their ability to build on momentum.
Still, their stellar act on Sunday has implications. First, the pan-democratic camp’s fragmentation or internal wrangling will lead to more diffused vote shares. Second, their growth is set to pile pressure on traditional groups such as the Democratic Party, which has failed to expand its share of votes compared to the 2011 election. They did not benefit from the Occupy protests.
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But the worst nightmare befell the pro-democracy radical groups of People Power and the League of Social Democrats, which saw their vote share shrink by almost 60 per cent combined, a clear sign of where voters’ threshold for radicalism lay.
Overall, pan-democratic groups and the umbrella soldiers won 476,485 votes, or 32.5 per cent of the 1.46 million votes cast in the first citywide election after the mass sit-ins last year in pursuit of democracy, which also inspired 50-plus fresh faces to run on Sunday.
“We did well in attracting young couples with a child, or the unmarried young people,” said Baggio Leung Chung-hang, convenor of Youngspiration, which fielded nine umbrella soldiers and won a seat.
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But the political capital might not easily translate into Legco gains, Leung conceded.
“To run in a Legco election is extremely costlier than in district councils,” he said.
But money is not the only obstacle. Most of the umbrella soldiers were loosely organised.
“On paper, they have enough votes to win a seat. But whether they can unite and nominate a candidate remains to be seen,” said Ivan Choy Chi-keung, a political scientist at Chinese University.
A Legco constituency has more candidates than a district council one, which means voters might not cast their only ballot to the new group so readily and easily, according to Professor Ma Ngok, head of the university’s department of government and public administration.
Ma also noted traditional parties had a stronger ability to draw votes. While it took more than 50 people for the “umbrella soldier” stream to score 70,000 votes, the Association for Democracy and People’s Livelihood – with decades of networking around Sham Shui Po – won 55,000 votes with just 26 candidates.
More remarkable than the ADPL were the NeoDemocrats, which had all but one of their 16 candidates score victories. Altogether, the group won 42,145 votes, 9 per cent of the camp’s total. With just five years under their belts, NeoDemocrats already produced this year’s “vote king”, with Yam Kai-bong scoring 4,148 votes in Yee Fu constituency in Tai Po.
The group broke away from the Democratic Party to protest against its ties with Beijing. The Democrats remained the city’s biggest pro-democracy group in terms of votes, winning close to 198,000 votes, or 42 per cent.
The losers in the pro-democracy camp were the traditional radical groups of People Power and the League of Social Democrats, which won not a single seat despite the more than 19,000 votes they received in total.
Democratic Party vice-chairman Lo Kin-hei said: “What is at stake for everyone in the pro-democracy campaign is to consolidate the support shown in the Sunday election.”
