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1,034 (of the 1,200) seats in the Election Committee |
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Turnout | 46.53% 18.93pp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The 2016 Election Committee subsector elections were held on 11 December 2016 for 1,034 of the 1,200 members of the Election Committee (EC) which is responsible for electing the Chief Executive of Hong Kong (CE) in the 2017 election.
Although incumbent Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying announced, two days before the election, that he would not be standing, the pro-democrats, whose campaign theme was opposition to Leung serving a second term, won a record quarter of the seats on the EC under the banner of "Democrats 300+" on a nearly 20 per cent surge in turnout over 2011.
The pro-democracy camp pocketed 205 seats in the 1,200-strong Election Committee and nominated Albert Ho of the Democratic Party to run against Leung Chun-ying and Henry Tang in 2012. The main goal for the pro-democrats in this election was to grab more than 300 seats to increase the chance of blocking the incumbent Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying to re-elected. In order to do that, the camp tended not to send a candidate in the election and become a "kingmaker" by boosting the chance for an alternative establishment candidate.
The six pro-democrats elected to the Legislative Council in functional constituencies in September, including Edward Yiu who took the seat in the traditional pro-Beijing sector and Leung Chun-ying's stronghold Architectural, Surveying, Planning and Landscape, formed an alliance called the Professionals Guild to coordinate candidates to contest in the Election Committee election. The victory in the Legislative Council functional constituencies encouraged the pro-democrats to take a more progressive strategy in the professional sector, in which the pro-democrats traditionally had more advantages. The pro-democrat professionals and activists also formed a loose coalition called "Democrats 300+" hoping to snatch over 300 seats in the committee.