Although the Hong Kong government has decided to postpone the Legislative Council election for one year, more and more voices are calling for the election to be held as soon as possible, and an opinion poll also shows that 70% of Hong Kong people want the Legislative Council election to be held as soon as possible, and if we calculate on the democratic voters alone, their support rate is 96%. Meanwhile, most of the democratic lawmakers decided to stay or go according to the choice of the majority of supporters in the poll, while the pan-democratic lawmakers in the functional constituency would take into account the opinions of the industry before making a decision, and two local lawmakers preferred to leave the legislature.
After the European Union, the “Five Eyes Coalition” including the United States and Australia, and the United Kingdom called on the Hong Kong government to reconsider its decision to postpone the Legislative Council election for one year in early August, some Hong Kong people signed a petition on the U.S. White House petition website to support the immediate re-launch of a clean 2020 Legislative Council election in Hong Kong, which has received nearly 12 percent of the vote in nine days. According to the practice of “We the People”, if the number of signatures exceeds 100,000, the White House will make a statement on the issue.
In Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Institute of Public Opinion released yesterday (4th) that it interviewed 14,691 citizens via email from August 31 to September 3 in the “We the People” group, and found that among the 12,293 supporters of the democratic camp, 96% of the respondents supported holding the Legislative Council election as soon as possible; but among the 1,254 non-government supporters, 96% of the respondents were in favor of holding the election as soon as possible. Among the democratic supporters, the opposition is predominant, with 55% opposed. After taking into account the weighted adjustments and other factors, 68% of the overall supporters believe that the election should be held as soon as possible, while 27% think it should not.
Dr. Kenneth Chan, an associate professor at the Department of Political Science and International Studies at Baptist University and a member of the Election Observation Project of the Institute for Public Opinion Research, said at the press conference that the results show that most Hong Kong people believe that the Legislative Council election should be held as scheduled, and that the Hong Kong government has delayed the election for one year with an emergency law, as if “the election has been stolen”. The government’s response to the “election of the Legislative Council” was that “the election of the Legislative Council will be held in the future. He also used data to refute Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s claim that the postponement of the Legislative Council election scheduled for tomorrow was “following the practice of other places” was misleading, pointing out that as of the end of last month, 77 countries or places had held elections amid the epidemic.
However, before the Hong Kong government changes its decision, it is still controversial whether the pan-democratic legislators will accept the decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China to postpone the elections for at least one more year. 15 of the 24 pan-democratic legislators have decided to stay or go according to the mainstream opinion of the opinion poll conducted by the Hong Kong Institute of Public Opinion on the 21st of this month. On the other hand, if more than half of the respondents thought they should leave the legislature, they would accept the choice of their supporters. If less than half of the respondents supported staying or leaving, the legislators would make a political judgment based on different information.
As to the question of only interviewing the supporters of the legislators who participated in the poll but not all voters in Hong Kong, Chairman of DP Wu Chi-wai explained that the democratic camp could not be influenced by the pro-establishment camp when deciding whether to stay or leave the legislature.
On the other hand, Legco members Chan Chi-chuen and Chu Kai-dee, who belong to the local camp, are inclined to leave the Legco, and the former has already cleaned up his office in the Legco.
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