BREAKING: Pro-democracy candidates Au Nok-hin and Gary Fan elected to Hong Kong LegCo

Pro-democracy candidate Edward Yiu was defeated by pro-establishment candidate Vincent Cheng

[UPDATE: 4pm] Pro-democracy candidate Edward Yiu ended up losing to pro-establishment candidate Vincent Cheng by just 2,419 votes out of 215,333 ballots cast in Kowloon West. Yiu has blamed his loss on “campaigning failures and his inexperience in direct local elections.”

Yiu’s loss means that pro-democracy candidates were only able to recover two of the four seats that were vacated over last year’s oath-taking controversy.

Hong Kong voters cast their ballots in a by-election on Sunday to fill four Legislative Council seats vacated last year by pro-democracy lawmakers disqualified for violating the terms of their legislative oaths.

Polls are now closed, with Hong Kong Free Press reporting voter turnout at a tepid 43%, well below the 2016 (58.3%) and 2012 (53.1%) elections.

According to results posted to the official election website, pro-democracy candidates Au Nok-hin and Gary Fan have prevailed in the Hong Kong Island and New Territories East constituencies respectively. Independent democrat Paul Zimmerman failed to reclaim the architectural, surveying, planning, and landscape functional constituency vacated by Yiu, falling to pro-Beijing lawmaker Tony Tse, as was widely expected.

Footage surfaced on social media of pro-establishment supporters engaging in heckling and intimidation tactics against pro-democracy activists on Sunday afternoon. Among those targeted were Umbrella Movement organizers Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow.

Once vying to become Hong Kong’s youngest legislator ever, Chow’s short-lived campaign for the Hong Kong Island seat ended abruptly in January after authorities barred her from running, claiming that her party’s advocacy of “self-determination” contradicts the territory’s Basic Law.

The disqualification left Au Nok-hin — her replacement on the ticket (playfully nicknamed Agnes B) — in the lurch, with only a month and a half before the election to cobble together a viable campaign.

“Banning Agnes is in essence the government’s way of giving the pro-Beijing candidates an unfair advantage,” Au told HKFP in a pre-election interview. “I’d even call it election fraud.”

Promising to prioritize education reform, property market regulation, and business-friendly economic policy, Au is cynical about the power vested in the seat to which he has been elected. “Being in the Legislative Council is quite limited,” he told the New York Times.“Whatever policy changes, or whatever policy actions, right now are under strong power from Beijing.”

Above all else, Au said that he hoped voters would approach the by-election as an act of protest against “the injustice done to [disqualified pro-democracy lawmaker] Nathan Law and Agnes Chow. An attack on one is an attack on all: if the government can strip [pro-democracy party] Demosisto of its political rights today, what is there to stop them from coming after you and me tomorrow?”

The by-election has been billed by some as a referendum on the legitimacy of the government’s choice to disqualify certain candidates based on the nature of their political beliefs.

[Images via HKFP / Facebook]