Hong Kong third wave: pro-Beijing politicians call for postponement of elections amid coronavirus crisis
- Pro-Beijing heavyweight Tam Yiu-chung questions why officials have not considered the possibility of postponing the Legislative Council polls
- City’s leader Carrie Lam has said there is currently no change in the plans to hold the elections on September 6
Tam Yiu-chung, the city’s sole delegate to China’s top legislative body, on Monday questioned why officials had not considered the possibility of postponing the vote.
“There are only 50 days left. How can the government promise it can get the pandemic under control in 50 days?” he said. “If there is another big outbreak after the elections, how can our society and economy survive?”
Tam, former chairman of the city’s largest pro-government party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), dismissed the idea the camp feared another defeat – after an unprecedented loss in last November’s district council elections.
“I’m just afraid of Hong Kong being the loser if another outbreak occurs,” he said.
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DAB candidate Joe Lai Wing-ho, who is running in the Kowloon East constituency, was also concerned about the coronavirus.
“I’ve collected 100 nominations and signed up for the elections. But Kowloon East has been badly hit [by Covid-19] recently, I don’t want my volunteers to take so much risk,” he said.
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“More than 250 polling stations were involved in the unlawful primary … how much risk was created for the virus to spread quickly,” it said.
But opposition figures questioned whether their rivals were merely seeking a delay because they feared losing and urged the government to do better in curbing the coronavirus rather than postpone the elections.
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“The Chinese Communist Party does not want Hong Kong people’s voices to be heard in the legislature,” legislator Eddie Chu Hoi-dick said. “So, it wants to delay the election or disqualify pan-democratic candidates.
“But the response to the primary shows Hong Kong people will fight back harder in the face of greater pressure from Beijing.”
Civic Party leader Alvin Yeung Ngok-kiu said People’s Daily was making an “empty allegation”.
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“The pro-establishment camp fears it will lose. So they want the election to be postponed using the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse,” he said. “But what Hong Kong people should instead ask about is the poor job the government has done in the past few months to see the epidemic return one wave after one.”
Pan-democrat lawmaker Tanya Chan argued that only health experts were in the position to call for a postponement.
Pro-Beijing lawmaker Priscilla Leung Mei-fun, who is seeking re-election in the Kowloon West constituency, noted that many Hong Kong people were staying in mainland China amid the outbreak, and immigration and quarantine measures could make it difficult for them to return to vote.
“Many Hongkongers cannot return home to vote, are you depriving them of their right to vote?” she said
Under the Basic Law, each term in the legislature lasts for four years, with the current one ending on September 30, However, under the Legco ordinance, an election can only be postponed for 14 days.
Asked if the government could still operate if lawmakers had yet to be elected, Leung, a member of the Basic Law Committee, said the chief executive had discretionary power to make emergency laws when significant public interest was involved.
Professor Lau Siu-kai, vice-president of semi-official think tank the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, said it was too early to decide if the vote should be postponed, and believed Beijing had a role in the final decision.
“It won’t be a very fair election if candidates cannot launch election campaigns, and hundreds of thousands of voters are still on the mainland,” he said.
Lau believed Beijing agreed to go ahead with the district council elections last year after some overly optimistic projections and would not take the decision lightly this time.
Ma Ngok, a political scientist at Chinese University, believed the pro-establishment side was pessimistic about its election prospects. “But they should understand that a postponement will not help even if it is delayed for a year,” he added.
Additional reporting by Ng Kang-chung and Tony Cheung