Over 90 per cent of the district councillors elected by the public and a small circle of voters on Sunday are also members of the three government-appointed committees responsible for nominating who was able run in Hong Kong’s “patriots-only” local election.
Hong Kong held District Council elections on Sunday, the first since Beijing overhauled the local electoral system, which slashed democratic representation and added a vetting process to ensure that only “patriots” could run.
New power was also given to three district-level committees – the district fight-crime, fire safety, and area committees. The committees’ 2,500-odd members are responsible for electing 176 seats in the District Committees constituencies, as well as nominating candidates to run for the committee seats and in the public vote.
A total of 163, or 92.6 per cent, of the 176 seats in the small-circle committee elections were themselves members of the three committees, according to a HKFP tally.
In the race voted for by the general public, 84, or 95.4 per cent, of the 88 seats also sat on one of the three committees.
In total, 247, or 93.6 per cent, of the 264 elected seats were members of the three committees.
The remaining District Council seats will be appointed, and will include 179 people picked by the chief executive, as well as 27 representatives of rural committees.
An earlier analysis by HKFP found that over 75 per cent of the candidates who ran for public election were members of the three committees. Among the 44 recently-redrawn districts, 13 were contested only by candidates who also belonged to the three committees.
Record-low turnout since 1997
Sunday’s polls saw the lowest turnout since the city returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
Around 1.19 million eligible electors cast their ballots, marking a 27.5 per cent voter turnout – a significant drop from the record-high 71.2 per cent logged during the last District Council election held in 2019 amid the extradition bill protests.
Sunday’s turnout was also lower than that in the 2021 legislative election, when 30.2 per cent voters headed to the polls following the “patriots-only” electoral overhaul.
Lau Siu-kai, a consultant for semi-official pro-Beijing think tank the Chinese Association of Hong Kong & Macao Studies, told i-Cable on Monday that he believed the pro-establishment camps had “exhausted” their capacity to mobilise supporters.
“The patriotic camp’s voter base had been mobilised up to 80 per cent, or even 90 per cent,” Lau said in Cantonese. In the 2019 polls, the pro-establishment camp had bagged around 1.23 million votes, while the pro-democracy camp had received around 1.67 million votes.
He said voter turnout may rebound only after the opposition voters had “realised the facts” and “accepted the new political order.”
Electoral overhaul
Plans to overhaul the District Council elections were unveiled in May 2023 to ensure only “patriots” could govern, following a similar overhaul in the 2021 legislative election and the pro-democracy landslide at the last polls in 2019.
The number of seats chosen democratically by the public were slashed from 452 to 88 – reducing the power of public votes to a fifth. The rest are to be chosen by the city’s leader and government-appointed committees.
Constituency boundaries were redrawn, the opposition were shut out, voting hours were slashed by an hour, and each local council is to be chaired by a government official, similar to colonial-era arrangements. All candidates undergo national security vetting to ensure patriotism.
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