Four years ago this month, Tik Chi-yuen was crisscrossing Hong Kong, racking up over 15,000 steps a day.
The chairperson of the centrist party Third Side at the time was on a mission to visit as many NGOs as he could to canvass votes in the 2021 Legislative Council (LegCo) elections. Tik, a registered social worker, was running as a representative of the social welfare sector.
However, three weeks away from the “patriots only” legislative polls, Tik – who won a seat in 2021 – is not doing the same hustle this time.
Tik, one of 35 incumbent lawmakers not seeking re-election, planned to field another Third Side member to run in his place, with whom he would have hit the campaign trail. The party had three potential candidates in mind, the 68-year-old veteran politician said.
But none of them were able to secure the nominations needed to run for election.
In the wake of Beijing’s electoral overhaul in 2021, which applies to both LegCo and District Council races, centrist groups like Third Side have been struggling to secure enough nominations to field election candidates.
To run in legislative elections, for example, candidates are required to obtain endorsements from at least two nominees in each of the five sectors of the Election Committee, a small circle of political elites.
The change, enacted months before the December 2021 elections, resulted in no opposition lawmakers in the 2022-25 LegCo term.
Tik said his party members received nominations far below the required threshold.
“[The people we asked] said they had already nominated others, or that they don’t really know our members, so they declined to endorse,” Tik told HKFP in Cantonese on Monday.
A total of 161 candidates are running in the LegCo elections on December 7. The city’s biggest pro-Beijing party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), has the largest representation, with 26 members contesting.
The Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (FTU) and the Business Professionals Alliance of Hong Kong (BPA) are fielding 16 and 14 candidates, respectively. The New People’s Party (NPP) is sending eight members.
Middle-of-the-road groups
Not long ago, Hong Kong’s political landscape was dominated by pro-Beijing and pro-democracy parties.
Since Beijing passed a national security law in 2020, however, three of the city’s largest pro-democracy parties – the Democratic Party, the Civic Party and the League of Social Democrats – have either disbanded or announced disbandment.
The middle of the political spectrum survived. It is occupied by small centrist groups and pro-establishment organisations with more moderate leanings, such as Third Side, the PoD Research Institute, and Roundtable.
Most were founded by veteran politicians disillusioned by their parties, which they thought tilted too closely to pro-Beijing or pro-democracy ideals.
Of those three, Third Side and Roundtable are represented by one lawmaker each, while the PoD Research Institute does not have any LegCo members.
Third Side was still able to take part in the LegCo race in 2021, with the two candidates they fielded garnering enough nominations to run.
However, during the 2023 District Council elections, Third Side failed to collect the nominations needed for its two candidates.
For the 2025 LegCo elections, the party received even fewer nominations compared with two years ago, Tik said.
“We don’t want to speculate why we haven’t been able to get enough nominations,” he said. “But I don’t think there is any restriction or order against our party’s members running.”
He added that the party would not give up, and would still attempt to send candidates in future elections.
Running as independents
Also absent from this year’s LegCo elections is moderate think tank PoD Research Institute, formerly known as Path of Democracy.
It changed its name in September to avoid “misunderstanding” that it was a political group, said convenor Ronny Tong, who set up the think tank in 2015 after quitting the pro-democracy Civic Party, which he co-founded.
The think tank has been represented in every District Council and Legislative Council election since its founding in 2015.
This year, two PoD Research Institute members, Jeffrey Chan and Allan Wong, are running but not representing the think tank.
Chan is vying for a seat in Kowloon Central, while Wong is running in the New Territories Northeast. Both left the political affiliation field blank in their applications.
The two declined an interview request from HKFP.
Tong denied that the two think tank members running in the December race were barred from contesting under the group’s name.
He told HKFP that, unlike what had been reported by other media, the think tank, as a research organisation and not a political entity, had never “fielded” candidates to run for election.
The group has never sat down to discuss candidate appointments or campaign strategies, he added. Instead, members made their own decisions about whether they wanted to run, and the think tank supported them.
The PoD Research Institute had two members running in the LegCo elections in 2021 and one in the District Council elections in 2023.
But that was a fraction of what members had initially hoped for. According to local media reports, the group had five members interested in running in 2021, but most were unable to get the required nominations.
In 2023, around half a dozen members wanted to run. Tong said at the time that he believed the threshold for nominations could be relaxed to allow more people to stand in the race.
The system of candidates seeking nominations from people they might not know is “less than ideal, both from the point of view of the nominator and the nominee,” Tong, a member of the Executive Council, the government’s advisory body, told HKFP.
He opined that it would be “less of a problem” if nominators could be more receptive to the idea of nominating people they don’t know well, or if there were a mechanism for nominees and nominators to get acquainted.
‘Of course we want to run’
Among the pro-establishment groups currently represented in the Legislative Council, veteran lawmaker Michael Tien’s Roundtable is perhaps most known for having a more moderate stance.
Tien co-founded Roundtable in 2017 after leaving the New People’s Party, complaining that it was becoming too closely aligned to Beijing.
The 75-year-old, who has served in the LegCo since 2012, announced last month that he was not seeking re-election, along with the other 11 septuagenarian lawmakers.
Tien said he would “pass on the baton” to Mark Chong, his assistant and a fellow Roundtable member.
Chong, who is running in the New Territories Northwest as Roundtable’s sole candidate, received enough nominations this time, after failing four years ago.
“That year, both Tien and I were vying for nominations, so people nominated him instead of me,” Chong told HKFP. “This time, it was smooth because we only had one candidate.”
The 41-year-old added that he believed his visibility was higher now after running – albeit unsuccessfully – in the District Council elections in 2023. He managed to collect enough nominations to run that year, though four other Roundtable members were forced to sit out after failing to secure an endorsement.
At the time, Tien told reporters that those four members “knocked on the doors” of 241 people with the power to endorse candidates, and only 41 responded.
Asked if he was concerned that the nomination system had barred some candidates, like those from Third Side, from running in the December race, Chong said he had not paid much attention to their circumstances.
Meanwhile, Tik told HKFP that he was disappointed that his party would not be represented in the polls.
“As a political party, of course, we want to run in elections,” he said.
But he denied that the party’s absence from LegCo, as well as from the District Council, meant centrist groups like his were on the decline.
“I believe there are other ways that we can still make an impact on society,” Tik said.
