Legco seats next year the real prize for radical parties

By the time the district council election nominations closed two weeks ago, we could safely predict that the pro-democracy camp would lose a few seats in the elections.

On the surface, the reason appears simple: there is too much competition within the dissident camp. In the good old days, when the Democratic Party was acknowledged as leader of the camp, it set the rules for other members to obey. The rules seemed fair: don't challenge the incumbents within the pan-democratic camp. Instead, take on the common enemies - the pro-establishment candidates. Obviously, these rules favoured the Democratic Party, which occupies the largest number of seats in the district councils.

For a long time, other parties in the camp didn't dispute the rules, and went along with them.

Four years ago, however, the League of Social Democrats saw through the hegemonic nature of this arrangement, but at that time was still too weak to shake up the status quo.

This time, several new and apparently more radical dissident parties are challenging Democratic Party candidates in a number of constituencies. They are determined to 'punish' the democrat 'traitors' who they claim sold out their principles by supporting the government's constitutional reform plan.

These democratic rebels will not win many votes from pro-establishment supporters. But what they can do is split the dissident tickets in the small constituencies, thus benefiting the pro-establishment candidates there.

The Democratic Party is understandably furious about that. To many outsiders, too, this seems a highly emotional and somewhat short-sighted strategy on the part of a bunch of young hotheads, and is counterproductive to the democratic cause. It seems foolhardy because the inexperienced candidates who are parachuted onto the scattered battlefields simply have no chance of winning.