Do we like them?

Do we like Ho Iat Seng?

Our score: 4 out of 10. A quiet, low-scandal record with no hateful words found, but a thin file and an election under him that shut out opposition candidates.

Ho Iat Seng was born in Macau in 1957 into business money: his father was an early Macau industrialist, and he went on to run the family firm, Ho Tin Industries. Reporting at the time of his rise called him a well-connected, media-shy Beijing loyalist. He sat on the Executive Council from 2004 to 2009 and later became president of the Legislative Assembly.

He was elected Chief Executive on 25 August 2019 and sworn in that December, running the city through the Covid years. His 2020 policy address focused on welfare, jobs and administrative reform, and he pushed Macau's tie-ups with Hengqin and the Greater Bay Area as the way to cut its reliance on gaming.

The big black mark is the 2021 Legislative Assembly election, when authorities disqualified 21 candidates, most of them from the pro-democracy camp, on national security grounds, and turnout dropped sharply afterwards. The commission made the call, and we couldn't confirm his personal role from pages we could open. But it happened under his government, and that's the part to weigh.

On the harm check, searches turned up nothing from him on LGBTQ+ people, trans people, women, migrants or the climate, good or bad. That's a gap, not a clean bill: Macau still doesn't recognise same-sex relationships, and we found no sign he moved on it either way. He's also not a culture-war grifter or conspiracy peddler as far as the record shows.

In August 2024 he announced he would not seek a second term, and Sam Hou Fai succeeded him. In January 2026 he was given the Grand Lotus Medal of Honour, which the Macau Daily Times tied to his Covid-19 response. Nothing else new has turned up on him lately.

So: a steady, low-drama administrator with no court cases or misconduct claims we could find, who presided over a shrinking of the democratic space. It's a close call rather than a clear yes or no, and the record we could read is thinner than we'd like.