Close to 100 percent of a 300-member Election Committee have endorsed on forms to bolster the incumbent chief executive of the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) Edmund Ho Hau Wah's bid for a re-election.

Ho handed a sealed envelope containing the nearly 300 endorsement forms for his candidature nomination to the Chief Executive Electoral Affairs Committee on Tuesday. The 49-year-old chief executive said the exact number of endorsement would be revealed by the committee in due course. He merely expressed a "great joy" that he had garnered more endorsement than he had expected.

According to the related clauses of the Macao Chief Executive Election Law, chief executive runners must secure nomination by at least 50 members with the 300-member Chief Executive Election Committee to qualify the candidature for the running. Each committee member only has one vote for the nomination.

Since Ho has secured more than 250 votes for the nomination, he left no room for any other rivals to obtain enough nomination "tickets" to enter the ensuing election campaign. Ho is currently the only chief executive runner.

The election of Macao's next chief executive has been designated for August 29, as Ho's five-year term will expire on Dec. 19 this year, which will coincide with the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Macao SAR.

A spokesperson with Ho's election affairs office said that some members of the Election Committee have been unable to sign the forms because they were on overseas trips. Ho's lobbying activities for the candidature nomination with the committee will end on July 29.

Macao's biggest circulation Chinese-language daily, the Macao Daily, on Tuesday quoted an anonymous source as saying that 297 members of the committee, or 99 percent of the total, had signed the endorsement forms.

Answering the media's questions after handing in the endorsement forms, Ho said the "second chief executive" of the Macao SAR would be "bound to face" the issue of democratic development, adding he believed that the issue is "a general concern of society," and "the second chief executive will do the proper thing at the proper time, according to the Macao Basic Law."

Ho garnered 81.9 percent of the votes cast by a 199-member Election Committee in 1999 to become the first chief executive ever elected by Macao people.

Ho told the media on Tuesday that he would "listen to the opinions" of Macao residents during his two-week election campaign, which is officially scheduled to be held on August 14-27.

He stressed that he did not yet regard himself re-elected, based on the fact that he is supposed to garner more than half of the votes with the Election Committee to be cast in a secret ballot on August 29.

As the first chief executive of the Macao SAR, Ho enjoys a popularity for his clear-cut and effective strategy leading to Macao's smooth political transition and prominent economic recovery. Under his term, Macao's economy has sustained a growth for four years in a row and realized the fastest growth in history at 15.6 percent last year. 

(Xinhua News Agency July 27, 2004)