Martin Lee Chu-ming said on Friday that psychological fatigue was to blame for his “wrong” decision to put forward a proposal for electoral change earlier in the week.
The founding chairman of the Democratic Party apologised again to his critics in the pan-democratic camp and called for Beijing to show sincerity by retracting earlier suggestions made by mainland officials that “confrontational” members of the opposition camp could not be candidates for chief executive in 2017.
Lee said such a retraction would make negotiations between the mainland officials and pan-democrats on the issue of universal suffrage and the chief executive election possible again.
Lee's proposal included the suggestion that a minimum of five candidates should be allowed to run in the 2017 race, making it possible for at least one pan-democrat to run in the election.
This would mean that pan-democrats would have to accept that the 1,200-strong nominating committee would screen all candidates and would satisfy the stipulation by Qiao Xiaoyang, chairman of the National People’s Congress Law Committee, that all candidates be nominated by the committee “as a whole”.
Lee’s proposal met with a lukewarm response from fellow pan-democrats and created a heated debate on the introduction of “genuine” universal suffrage.
