25th November, 2019
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp swept district council elections in a landslide victory on Monday in what is widely seen as a referendum on months of anti-government protest.
Pro-democracy parties are set to control 388 of 452 available seats and 17 out of 18 district councils, in some cases unseating all pro-establishment candidates. While the district councils are mostly concerned with community affairs, they are represented in the group of 1,200 electors who will select the next chief executive in 2022.
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said in a statement that the vote appeared to “reflect people’s dissatisfaction with the current situation and the deep-seated problems in society.”
Pro-democracy candidates did particularly well in some of the areas hit hardest by anti-government protests over the past five months even as the city has been pushed into a recession amidst dwindling tourist figures.
Protests began in Hong Kong over legislation that would have allowed residents to be extradited to mainland China, but they have since come to represent a mass movement against the local and Beijing governments and police violence.
Many protesters expressed concern that the draft extradition bill was a sign that Hong Kong was losing to China the autonomy which the former British colony was promised for 50 years when it returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China under the “one country, two systems” arrangement until 2047.