But Hong Kong has a c
omplex system of multiple-seat geographic constituencies, in which voters choose slates of candidates. A "closed list" system of counting votes makes it relatively easy for the first person listed on each slate to be elected, but very hard for second and subsequent candidates on each slate to gain seats.
The pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong used this arrangement to its advantage, running multiple slates in election districts across Hong Kong and using its formidable logistical network to guide tens of thousands of supporters to vote for one or another of its slates. As a result, the party won a series of seats for its top-of-the-slate candidates despite a weak overall vote count.
In an interview after votes had been counted for half the seats in the Legislature, Tam Yiu-chung, the party's chairman, denied suggestions by democracy advocates that his party had been
heavily subsidised by Beijing.
Tam also
denied accusations that his party had taken elderly people to the polls yesterday and had unfairly offered them various incentives to vote for the party's candidates.
Tam said that his party had relied on local fund-raising and that "the elderly people support DAB because they want stability".
The poorly financed Civic Party, lacking a grass-roots network to guide its supporters, ran a single slate in each constituency and tried to persuade as many voters as possible to vote for them.
The party's best known politician, Audrey Eu, and its rising star, Tanya Chan, listed themselves second on slates in the New Territories West constituency and Hong Kong Island respectively. Both ended up losing their seats.
Their slates were the biggest vote-getters by wide margins, gaining more than 70,000 votes in each case, compared with fewer than 45,000 votes for the next-best slate. But they still did not garner enough votes for either woman to be elected.
Chan said in an interview after her defeat that the party could not have done anything differently.
"It's quite difficult for us to estimate the supporters," she said.
"You can see that the infrastructure built by the pro-establishment camp worked professionally."
The Democratic Party, whittled down for years by defections to more radical political groupings, had the opposite problem from the Civic Party. It did try to run separate slates, but lacked the resources to coordinate voting by its supporters. The result was that several slates lost entirely, and the party ended up with a handful of seats despite a fairly strong vote count.
Albert Ho, the party chairman, announced that he would submit his resignation at a meeting of the party's central committee on Monday evening, following a party tradition that the leader resign after an election setback.
Democracy advocates did win three of the five new "super seats" in the Legislature, for which nearly all adults in the territory could vote. While the new seats have no extra voting power in the 70-seat Legislature, the breadth of the voting for them could give extra influence to these members.
Mr. Ho was among the three winners, but said that he would still resign because his party lost at least three other seats. "This election was a defeat for our party," he said. In an interview, Mr. Ho said that Hong Kong businesspeople with operations on the mainland had told him of intense
pressure from Beijing to give money to pro-Beijing parties in Hong Kong.
Democracy advocates needed 24 seats to block major legislative initiatives. They won 27, but three of them were captured by members of the radical People Power party, which has refused to cooperate with other pro-democracy parties.
On economic policy issues like raising the minimum wage,
pro-business candidates won 21 seats and pro-labor candidates won 22 seats while centrists won the rest. Michael DeGolyer, a longtime pollster and political analyst at Hong Kong Baptist University said that the party alignments
among the centrists also made them likely to tilt toward populism, and he predicted that Leung Chun-ying, the new chief executive who took office on July 1, would move in this direction as well.
"The business community is not going to be happy," Mr. DeGolyer said. Only 40 of the Legislature's seats are elected by the general public; the other 30 are chosen by industries like banking and by professions like the law and Chinese medicine. These functional constituencies, as they are known, are mostly dominated by people who have connections to mainland China, many of whom have investments there; they tend to choose pro-Beijing lawmakers.
The Hong Kong government retreated early Saturday evening from its previous insistence that "moral and national education" become mandatory in the territory's schools by 2015. Instead, the government said, each school would be allowed to decide whether to offer the subject.
The initial insistence that the program be mandatory touched off a 10-day sit-in at the local government's headquarters by students wearing black T-shirts. By Friday night, the crowd at the sit-in numbered 120,000, the organizers said, and on Saturday night, 100,000; the police's estimates were about one-third of those totals.
Scholarism, the student group that led the protests, decided Saturday night to end the sit-in. By Sunday evening, students had packed up most of their gear, although 20 tents remained at the protest site.
Heidi Ma, a spokeswoman for Scholarism who was helping to coordinate the cleanup, said that those tents would also be removed, but she added that the group could yet hold further protests because many members were
dissatisfied that the education program had not been withdrawn completely.
While the education plan antagonized many parents and students, it may have also prompted some voters to support candidates who seek a stronger local government and a closer relationship with the national government in Beijing.
Walking the family dog, Edmond Chiu, a 53-year-old doctor, went to vote on Sunday evening and said afterward that he worried that Hong Kong was becoming too politicized.
"I want to vote in such a way as to prevent Hong Kong from becoming ungovernable," he said, while declining to say which candidates he supported. "People are going to extremes. Parents are teaching their kids not to negotiate, not to compromise, not to reason."
Regina Ip, a former secretary of security who mounted an unsuccessful effort in 2003 to introduce stringent internal security legislation, led her nascent political group, the pro-Beijing New People's Party, to win a seat in each of two geographic constituencies in the new legislature, a strong showing for a small organization. Flanked by supporters in dark pinstriped suits, she saidthat she planned to expand her party.
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By making it easier for small parties and independents to win at least one seat, Hong Kong's electoral system has fragmented the territory's political parties and limited the influence of the Legislature. Over the years, that has helped the territory's chief executives and their ministers to dominate the political process.
But in the last 10 days before the voting began on Sunday, the education dispute seemed at least temporarily to curb the fissiparous trend in Hong Kong politics. Political parties with clear positions on relations with mainland China fared better, at the expense of independents who tried
to emphasize the economy.
Christine Fong, an independent who campaigned on economic issues but also opposed the government's education plan, attributed her defeat to the public's intense focus on the territory's relationship with Beijing in the final days of the campaign, "rather than on livelihood."
Pro-Beijing alliance gains in HK polls - Yahoo! News India
Pro-Beijing alliance gains in HK polls - Yahoo! News India