Civic choice and nominating committee are not mutually exclusive

Politics is the art of the possible," said Otto von Bismarck, Germany's first chancellor after the Treaty of Versailles.

A group of 18 local academics, myself included, have risen to this challenge in putting forward a proposal for electing the chief executive by universal suffrage in 2017.

An acceptable plan borders on the impossible amid the current impasse. On the one hand, members of the pan-democratic camp insist on nominating chief executive candidates by civic nomination to achieve "true democracy", while on the other, officials from the central and Hong Kong governments maintain any proposal that tampers with the substantive nomination power of the nominating committee is unconstitutional under the Basic Law and the National People's Congress Standing Committee's decisions.

Yet we believe it is possible, within Hong Kong's constitutional framework, to enable candidates of different political views to stand for the chief executive election under universal suffrage.

Hence, we put forward a proposal that contains four key elements:

• The introduction of a statutory "civic recommendation" track that precedes the nominating procedure, allowing an eligible person supported by 2 per cent of all registered voters (approximately 70,000) to become a "potential candidate" to be considered by the nominating committee.

• A nomination threshold of one-eighth of the members of the committee, that is, 150, in accordance with the existing arrangement.

• The composition of the nominating committee may be modelled after the existing 1,200-member Election Committee, but with an enlarged electoral base, including replacing the corporate votes with individual votes.