DEMOCRACY IS CANCELLED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
Hong Kong was scheduled to have its next LegCo election next month. It has now been postponed to next year.
The move has been condemned by Donald Trump - who as it happens wants to postpone the US election in November.
Let’s blog this, shall we?
1. The excuse for the HK election postponement is COVID-19. The loyalists either really believe this or are pretending to do so. The rest of us are reasonably convinced the actual reason is that Beijing wants it postponed because if we hold it on time, there’s a decent chance that the pan-Democrats might actually gain ground or - even worse - win a decent-sized majority. And we can’t have that.
2. We were expecting this, of course. Both the HK govt and Beijing went out of their way to state that the pan-Demo primary was probably maybe a violation of our shiny new National Security law. This was followed by election officers asking the pan-Demo candidates who topped that primary to ask them whether they would support the NSL and every other HK govt policy wholeheartedly and without question (and the answer had better be yes, and it had better be a convincing yes).
Result: 12 of them were disqualified. Which was also expected - not least because Beijing was directly involved in the decision.
The only reason to think they might not postpone the election was if Beijing opted to just keep disqualifying pan-Demos until there were none left. Why cancel an election when you can just rig it? But I suppose they thought that was too blatant - that, and the pan-Demos planned to make them work for it by having a rather long list of back-up candidates.
Anyway, Stephen Vines sums it up well here, but basically Beijing has made it clear that it will only suffer the pan-Demos’ existence as long as they have no real power and they learn to shut up and like it. And given the momentum the pan-Demos have thanks to the Lam admin being generally hopeless at handling major crises like political unrest and COVID-19, Beijing apparently decided they would much rather call off the election using a plausible excuse like COVID-19 than take a chance that DQing candidates they don’t like might be too obvious.
3. Speaking of which, the COVID-19 excuse is also nonsense. Carrie Lam pointed out that several countries have also postponed elections because of COVID-19. Which is true, but plenty of others have successfully held elections - and their COVID stats are far worse than HK’s. The pan-Demo primary was a masterclass in holding an election safely, and that was organized and managed by a tiny polling organization with minimal resources. The HK govt has far greater resources and is perfectly capable of taking measures to ensure the Sept election is carried out as safely as possible. It just doesn’t want to.
4. Which raises the obvious question: will the election really take place in one year? And the obvious answer is: who knows? I think Beijing needs HK to have an election at some point, otherwise they can’t exactly claim with a straight face that HK is a democracy under One Country Two Systems. However, I’m reasonably sure that Beijing will not give the green light until they’re convinced the pro-BJ camp can’t possibly lose.
5. The other obvious question is how the current LegCo can legally keep serving for a year after everyone’s term expires? No one knows yet. But I fully expect the solution to be bad news for the pan-Demos still in LegCo (four of whom were among those disqualified from running again).
5. As for Trump wanting to delay the November election because of non-existent mail fraud, the catch is that you can never tell when he’s serious and when he’s just spouting paranoid nonsense to feed the base.
The one thing we can be reasonably sure of is that it’s not just because he’s worried about mail-in votes. He’s worried about having his ass handed to him, which would not only bruise his ego, but make him more likely to face prosecution and jail for his many high crimes and misdemeanors.
I don’t know how worried he is about the latter. But I do think at the very least he’s continuing his efforts to lay down the groundwork to de-legitimize the results should he lose.
6. Also, I take little solace in the technical fact that legally and Constitutionally, Trump can’t unilaterally delay the election. Which is true, but Trump somehow strikes me as the kind of guy who doesn't really care about breaking laws or violating the Constitution.
That said, in order for him to literally prevent the election from going ahead in all 50 states, he’d need some way to enforce that. I don't think the MAGA Boogaloo Cult with their AR-15s and whatnot have the manpower or firepower to stop every single election in each state. He’d need the support of the National Guard and Armed Forces commanders - which might look and feel too much like a coup for their taste.
I’m not saying he won’t try. I’m just saying his odds of succeeding are not good. At least right now. But as I say, I think he mainly wants his MAGA cult to throw a locked-and-loaded hissyfit if he loses and take their anger out on whatever liberals and minorities happen to be at hand while he tweets for the rest of his life from a secure location about the Democratic Liberal Coup of 2020.
7. Anyway it takes some nerve for him to send his press secretary out to condemn the HK election postponement when he’s planning on doing the exact same thing at home, and with an even flimsier excuse. On the other hand, it’s very on-brand.
Cancel culture,
This is dF
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