The overwhelming majority of potential voters did not participate in a poll that most consider dummy. The new Electoral Code imposed by Beijing prevented any possibility of participation of prémerémiocracy candidates.
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With only 30% of participation for the election of the only seats to be designated by universal suffrage from the new Parliament of Hong Kong, the December 19 vote is a scathing disadvantage of the pro-Beijing government conducted by Carrie Lam. In absolute numbers, 3.1 of the 4.5 million voters abstained from voting Sunday, despite the many means deployed to encourage them to do so. Nearly 2% of newsletters were white or void. It is by far the lowest participation rate ever reached in parliamentary elections since the retrocession of Hongkong to China in 1997.
These pseudo-elections are in fact the culmination of a long purification process of Parliament, which started in 2016, when an unexpected number of rebel young members had managed to be elected. A disqualification procedure imposed by Beijing had eliminated the most indocile elements, the pretext of poorly loose oaths. Beijing then tried safer to change the organization of Parliament by imposing a new electoral code in March 2021, a way of keeping an appearance of democratic consultation by eliminating the slightest risk. Beijing has also published Monday morning a white paper on “democracy with features of Hongkong”.
In total, 153 “patriotic” candidates were competing for the 90 seats of the new Parliament, defined by the Electoral Code designed and imposed by Beijing in March. All the candidates had passed beforehand by a laborious validation process, to the detriment of those of the Prémarocracy camp, which could not arise.
The candidates of the Democratic Alliance for Improvement and Progress, the great pro-Beijing party of Hong Kong (where the Chinese Communist Party is not represented), have almost all been elected or re-elected. The few candidates who, like a bus driver, an electrician, the famous Canadian naturalized Chinese businessman Allan Zeman, or the old British official, also naturalized Chinese, Mike Rowse, would have could bring a small element of “diversity” to this parliament, were all beaten.
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Although the ballot was devoid of any political issue, the government still hoped to reach a participation rate that would give a semblance of credibility for this exercise. An intense advertising campaign took place, and a law criminalizing calls for boycott or blank vote was adopted. The polling stations remained open for fourteen hours in a row. Three other exceptional polling stations have also been installed at the border with China to enable Hong Kong citizens living in mainland China to vote – without having to comply with preferred formalities of quarantine.
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