FOR 16 months, two seats in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council have sat empty. Four more have been vacant for eight. That the seats were empty in the first place was an affront to the city’s pro- democracy movement. The previous incumbents, elected only in 2016, had been disqualified for using their oathtaking speeches to criticise the governments of both Hong Kong and China. In the by-elections to fill four of the vacancies, on March 11th, the democrats suffered a further setback. Their candidates lost two of the four seats, one of them unexpectedly, depriving them of much of their legislative clout.
The Legislative Council, also known as Legco, is a body left over from British rule, part of which is democratically elected. It is riven between two ideological groups: the “pro-establishment” camp, which can be expected to support both Hong Kong’s government and, by extension, the Chinese one; and the “pan-democrats” who routinely oppose them. The establishment has a built-in advantage, in that only half the 70 seats are filled by...Continue reading
from Asia http://ift.tt/2FwKB7Z
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment