The pro-democracy camp has seen a landslide in at least six sectors of Sunday’s Chief Executive Election Committee poll, and expects to win at least 325 seats in the 1,200-seat committee.
The camp has won all seats in six professional sectors: social welfare, IT, health services, legal, education and higher education. The camp also gained almost all seats in the accountancy sector and the architectural sectors.
In the medical sector, 85 people were running for 30 seats. The pro-democracy camp sent 19 candidates and all of them won.
The camp also made some breakthroughs in sectors such as Chinese medicine, with three wins out of the 30 seats.
Many of the winners belong to a list of 352 candidates from the election alliance Democracy 300+, which initially was formed to gain seats to stop sitting Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying from getting re-elected and to call for a change of election system to achieve genuine universal suffrage.
Leung declared last Friday he would not run for re-election citing family reasons, but the move did not stop the camp from getting the highly anticipated result of more than 300 seats. The camp only held 210 seats in the last election for the committee in 2011.
Lawmakers who pushed forward the alliance cheered the results.
Education sector lawmaker Ip Kin-yuen said the result was related to the record high turnout of 46 per cent on Sunday. Dennis Kwok Wing-hang, legal sector lawmaker, said the voters were “very smart” to keep up the enthusiasm for voting despite Leung throwing in the towel.
“They see the situation very clearly,” Kwok said.
Charles Mok, IT sector lawmaker, said the goal of the alliance was not only to stop Leung from being re-elected.
“We need to defend Hong Kong’s core values, and fight for the restart of the political reform process, outside the August 31 framework [set in 2014],” he said. “No matter which person the central government wants to handpick… the voices made by these professional sectors are very clear. We beat our opponents by large margins.”
Alvin Wong Yam-hong, a winner in the medical sector, said they have reservations about all potential candidates, namely John Tsang who resigned as Financial Secretary on Monday, Chief Secretary Carrie Lam and lawmaker Regina Ip.
“Our team picks [the best] election platform but not the candidate, it is the same even for a pro-democracy candidate in the race – they have to convince us they will bring genuine universal suffrage to Hong Kong, that they can give a real timetable, that they can govern for the interests of Hong Kong people but not particular sectors, ” he said.
However there was also a setback for the pro-democracy camp: the 15-member ARTicipants for the culture sub-sector were all defeated by pro-Beijing candidates.
Most of the other seats are controlled by the pro-Beijing camp, with eleven sectors held by ex-officio members or already automatically elected on Sunday owing to lack of contestants.
The 325 pro-democracy camp elected:
-Social Welfare: 60
-Information Technology: 30
-Health Services: 30
-Legal: 30
-Education: 30
-Higher Education: 30
-Accountancy: 26
-Architectural, Surveying, Planning and Landscape: 25
-Medical: 19
-Engineering: 15
-Chinese Medicine: 3
-Legislative Council members: 27
