HONG KONG (Dispatches) —
Candidates loyal to China’s Communist Party won a landslide victory in Hong Kong’s legislative elections.
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said during a news conference Monday she was “satisfied” with the election.
She said that the number of registered voters reached 92.5%, a record high compared to the 2012 and 2016 elections, when around 70% of voters had registered.
“For registered voters, deciding whether they want to exercise their voting rights in a particular election is entirely a matter for themselves,” she said.
“In this election, 1.35 million voters cast their votes. They did not just return candidates of their choice to LegCo, and I think it was also because of their support for the improved electoral system,” said Lam, referring to the city’s Legislative Council.
Lam said that even if there was a high turnout based on “poor politics,” such as the political polarization during the period of political strife in 2019, that is “not something we should be glad to have.”
Starry Lee, an elected pro-Beijing legislative council candidate from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong party, said the 30% turnout was within “general public expectation.”
“As I have mentioned before, this is a new system, this is a system that we call patriots administrating Hong Kong,” Lee said.
“This is a different one from the previous one, therefore you cannot compare directly. And I believe that with the new system, people need time to get used to that.”
The opposition camp has criticized the elections, with the Democratic Party fielding no candidates for the first time since the 1997 handover.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said there were “multiple reasons” for the decline in voter turnout.
“It is not only the impact of the pandemic, but also the disruption and sabotage of anti-China elements in Hong Kong and external forces,” Zhao said at a daily briefing.
Some overseas groups, including London-based Nathan Law, urged a boycott of the vote. Under the new election laws, incitement to boycott the voting or to cast invalid votes could be punished by up to three years in jail and a 200,000 Hong Kong dollar ($26,500) fine.
Lam said she expects that work with the 90 legislators will be “very exciting” because they have different opinions on many social issues.