Hong Kong Legislative Council election: defeated centrists, moderates blame low turnout, warn pro-establishment camp can now ‘do anything’
- With mainstream opposition parties shunning the poll, centrist candidates hoped they could offer voters an alternative to the establishment
- But the near-total rout of non-establishment candidates leaves the new Legco firmly in the grip of pro-Beijing lawmakers
All signs indicated that Hong Kong’s opposition-leaning voters were likely to give the polls a miss after Beijing’s “patriots-only” overhaul of the electoral system effectively shut out the candidates they might have backed. But even as late as last Tuesday, Poon, 51, told a Chinese-language newspaper in a pre-election interview that he thought he still stood a chance to win.
Reality hit home early Monday morning, when results were unveiled showing Poon had finished last among four candidates, with only 14,435 votes.
The constituency’s two seats went to the biggest winner, Stanley Ng Chau-pei, 51, from the pro-establishment Federation of Trade Unions, who scored 64,506 votes, and runner-up Edward Leung-hei, 36, from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, with 26,799.
Poon was not even close to overtaking third-placed Marcus Liu Tin-shing, 38, who secured 23,171 votes.
But his defeat was not the worst among the 11 centrist and moderate candidates running in the geographical constituencies in a bid to offer voters some choice in an election shunned by the city’s main opposition parties.
That unfortunate achievement went to Jeffrey Chan Chun-hung, 44, of the Path of Democracy, who managed only 2,999 votes in Kowloon East.
Altogether, the non-establishment candidates running in the 10 geographical constituencies bagged a total of just 87,540 votes, or 6.48 per cent of all valid ballots, well below the more than 50 per cent of valid votes that went to opposition candidates in 2016.