Ordinary Gweilo

It’s quite amusing to read this morning’s newspapers with their predictions of doom for the pan-democrats in the Legislative Council elections.  The Standard went with “Disaster Hits Democrats”, and the SCMP changed their headline during the night from “Turnout rocks pan-democrats” to “Turnout rocks Liberals, democrats”.  Well, half right.

In fact it was the Liberal Party that had a really bad night, with James Tien and Selina Chow losing their seats, and Michael Tien failing to make much impact in Kowloon West.  That meant the Liberal Party didn’t win a single seat in the geographical constituencies (though they retained 7 out of 8 of their seats in the Functional Constituencies).

The pan-democrats actually managed to gain a seat in the geographical constituencies, taking advantage of the Liberal Party’s problems by taking 5 out of 7 in New Territories East, though this was balanced by the loss of three seats in the functional constituencies.  Certainly not a disaster. 

Nor were the DAB the “big winners” (as the headline says).  They actually ended up with one seat fewer than 4 years ago.

The conventional wisdom is that the pan-democrats suffer when turnout is low and that, together with the results of an exit poll, was what prompted both The Standard and the SCMP to publish those front-page stories that now look rather silly.  This is from the SCMP’s front page story:

The pan-democratic camp was braced early today for the worst settback in a Legislative Council election since the hand over as only about 45 per cent of voters tumed out yesterday to cast their ballots.  The Liberal Party was also headed for a rout, with all their candidates in geographical constituencies likely to lose.  [..]

Exit poll results released by the University of Hong Kong’s public opinion programme last night showed pan-democrat heavyweights Audrey Eu Yuet-mee, Emily Lau Wai-hing, Lau Chin-shok and Albert Ho Chun-yan likely to lose. But early counting indicated that Ms Eu could beat rival Choy So-yuk, from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterrment and Progress of Hong Kong.

The worst-case scenario would see the pan-democrats win 15 seats in the geographical constituencies and four functional constituency seats. The pan-democrats won 25 seats in the 2000 election, 18 of which were returned by direction election.  The camp secured 22 seats in 2000.

We now know that the exit polls were wrong – although Lau Chin-shek did lose in Kowloon West, the rest of the pan-democrats mentioned above all won fairly comfortably, and their overall result was far better than the ‘worst-case scenario’ that the exit polls seemed to imply.  Back to the drawing board.