Overview
The Democratic Party (DP) is a centre-left liberal political party in Hong Kong. Chaired by Lo Kin-hei, it is the flagship party in the pro-democracy camp and currently has seven elected representatives in the District Councils.
The party was established in 1994 in a merger of the United Democrats of Hong Kong and Meeting Point in preparation for the 1995 Legislative Council election. The party won a landslide victory, received over 40 percent of the popular vote and became the largest party in the legislature in the final years of the British colonial era. It opposes the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen protests of 1989 and called for the end of one-party rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); the party has long been seen as hostile to the Beijing authorities.
Led by Martin Lee, the Democratic Party boycotted the Provisional Legislative Council (PLC) on the eve of the Hong Kong handover in 1997 in protest to Beijing's decision to dismantle the agreed transition, but reemerged as the largest party in the first SAR Legislative Council election of 1998. Due to the Beijing-installed proportional representation voting system, the Democrats embattled in bitter factional conflicts in the early post-handover era. Although the party's popularity briefly rebounded after the 2003 pro-democracy demonstration, its dominance was gradually eclipsed by the emergence of the new parties.
As a response to the electoral gains of the Civic Party and the League of Social Democrats (LSD), the Democratic Party merged with Emily Lau's The Frontier in 2008. The party made a surprising move by negotiating with the Beijing officials over the constitutional reform package in 2010. It resulted in a catastrophic split within the pro-democracy camp. Being ferociously attacked by the radical democrats, the party sharply lost support in the 2012 Legislative Council election, retaining only six seats. Afterwards, the Democrats underwent a rejuvenation process in which most veterans retired and made way for the new generation in the 2016 election.
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