Hong Kong’s legislative poll is fooling nobody

Arrangements for Hong Kong’s first legislative election under a revamped system are leaving little to chance. There must be competition — but not too much, and of the right kind. Meanwhile, the anti-corruption agency has warned against calls to cast blank ballots or abstain from voting — two of the few ways left for people to register disapproval of a Beijing-designed process from which political opposition has been excluded.
It’s been a slow start. As of November 3, five days after nominations opened, only 48 had been received for the 90 seats in the
Legislative Council. The nomination period runs until Friday. Chinese officials stationed in the city have expressed frustration over the lack of energy on display, according to accounts in local media. “No banners, no noise” read one headline in the South China Morning Post, a contrast to the months of vigorous street campaigning that characterised earlier, open elections.
Hong Kong’s electoral system was always designed to favour pro-establishment interests. In the last LegCo election in 2016, when turnout reached a record 58%, only half the seats in a 70-member council were directly elected. After Beijing’s changes, just 20 seats, or less than a quarter of the expanded chamber, will be chosen by the full electorate of 4.5 million. Even if opposition candidates somehow got past new vetting procedures and achieved a clean sweep, they would still be in a minority. With the
result not in doubt, such micro-management should be unnecessary. Why bother?
In practice, most authoritarian regimes attach a high significance to elections because they are seen as conferring legitimacy. Feigning conformity to established rules carries a ritual and symbolic power, as Lee Morgenbesser, who studies authoritarian systems at Australia’s Griffith University, has observed. Dictators from Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus to Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad have proclaimed a democratic mandate after elections that were clearly far from free and fair.
Autocracies have three, mutually reinforcing pillars of stability, according to the German political scientist Johannes Gerschewski: repression, co-optation and legitimation. After the instability of the 2019 pro-democracy protests, Hong Kong has relied primarily on the first, aided by a national security law that China imposed in
mid-2020.

—Bloomberg