Election of the day: Macau

On Sunday, September 14th, the residents of the Special Administrative District of Macau will elect 14 of the 33 seats in the Legislative Assembly of Macau. The remaining 19 seats are selected by considerably less democratic mechanisms: 7 are appointed by the chief executive, a role currently held by Sam Hou Fei. The chief executive is not democratically elected; he is elected by a simple majority of the election committee, an appointed body of 400 members, with 100 each from Industrial, Commercial, and Financial Sector, the Cultural, Educational, Professional, and Sports Sector, the Labor, Social Services, and Religious Sector, and the political sector. All four groups are dominated by pro-Beijing voices, predictably. The remaining 12 slots are selected by a system of “functional representation.” Each seat is allotted to a particular community, and members of that community elect them in their own fashion. The functional representative for business interests might be selected by ‘corporate vote’ (as in, firms cast a vote for them) while the seat representing doctors and lawyers is selected by that limited electorate on a one-person, one-vote election comprising members of that profession.

The 14 democratic seats are elected through closed list PR; there are eight party lists. This is less than usual, perhaps in part because of a Beijing crackdown on pro-democracy candidates. New rules put in place in 2024 require all candidates be screened by Beijing for sufficient patriotism and a number of pro-democracy candidates were rejected. This move caused significant protest in Hong Kong, but is largely supported by the various oligarchic interests, and probably the public generally in Macau, which is far more accepting of the Beijing’s interventions than Hong Kong is. I can’t tell you much about what separates these lists or what issues are being contested in this election, but I can tell you there is one party list–New Hope, headed by Jose Pereira Coutinho–that is pro-democracy and was allowed to contest the election. (Fun fact about Coutinho; in 2015 he ran for a seat in the Portuguese parliament in the “Outside Europe” constituency; had he won he would have been the only person in the world elected to parliaments in two different countries simultaneously. Alas, his upstart party did not achieve parliamentary representation, nor did it come particularly close.) The last election saw two pro-democracy candidates elected, to whether New Hope is able to maintain or build on that is one outcome worth watching for. Any Macanese readers, or readers with insights beyond what I’m able to provide here, are encouraged to chime in in the comments below.