Rear Window | Umbrellas in the House

Severo Portela

It looks like a kind of swampy unease has been spreading among Macau civil society. And it has been affecting everybody, indeed, from the traditional Legislative Assembly-based democrats, to the New Macau young democrats, labor representatives – not excluding the conservative pro-Beijing apparatus. The actual source of this (and I repeat) unease comes from not fully coping with the political standoff that took (and pardon us the generalization) eight Umbrella Movement seasoned activists from the road to the benches of the Hong Kong Legislative Council. The old guard of the Hong Kong pro-democracy activists and organizations, despite being sheltered under the cover of an umbrella – the pan-democrats umbrella – fear being on the fast track to obsolescence. The fact is that at the end of the hard fought civic campaign to further political rights – including the introduction of universal suffrage -, asked to show the goods, they just have the “same” 70-member quasi-parliament split of 35 from geographic constituencies and 35 from the functional constituencies: the “rotten borough” some would call it with assumed democratic disdain. The former are directly elected by the almost 4 million registered voters, while the special-interests’ seats are chosen by almost 240,000 individuals, corporate or businesses. That is 6% of the population.
Anyway, from now on, Hong Kong politics, including moderate democrats, will be challenged by a generational shift towards a more confrontational stance, apparently immune to all the antics of co-optation that Beijing usually manipulates to maintain a tight leash on the political development chez HKSAR.  The Nathan Law and friends show is just about to begin!
Back to Macau, the pro-democracy movement is trying its own way to digest the asymmetry between their Hong Kong counter-parts’ political game (localism, complete autonomy, self-determination, and Basic Law forbid independence) and the corresponding measures the establishment takes to fight the activists and their demands of political concessions, and the equivalent panorama in the Macau Special Administrative Region.
Despite the mellow (Legislative Assembly will keep on having the same composition for the next five years) situation in Macau, Scott Chiang, Jason Chao and Co have a lot to complain about the government, the law enforcement, the law and so on. They learned their lessons from the civil referendum, and later from the panda cubs’ naming referendum.
Imagination and cooperation seem to be the key for those who have been showing respect for democratic values. Macau Civil Servants Association is about to launch what they call a “public survey” to question residents about the performance of the Chief Executive and the need to increase the number of additional directly-elected legislators from two to four for the 2017 elections. However, it is not an open consultation, since it restricts itself to a closed universe of 3000 phone calls, thus not incurring in any breach of the Data Protection provisions. Pereira Coutinho did it again.
Finally, two notes on gaming and reading. With not such a great omen offered by MGTO’s visitor forecast during the Golden Week, Citigroup has degraded the September GGR forecast. But we should highlight two situations: a fresh case of side betting and disturbance in a VIP room, calling attention on the possibility of the financing and profit distribution to be diverting from the traditional pro rata basis; and the first steps DICJ Paulo Chan is taking to curb the entrance of croupiers to the gaming floor… to gamble themselves.
As to the reading, the New Central Library threatens to replace the Hotel Estoril as the urban narrative of the day. But we can have a two in one: lawmaker Tommy Lau has suggested replacing the Old Court building by…the Hotel Estoril.