HONG KONG—Police on Sunday had to rescue a prominent lawmaker after he was surrounded by youths who accused him at a public forum of betraying the city’s drive for democracy.

Albert Ho, a prominent lawmaker, had to be escorted by police from Victoria Park, where he had attended a forum on an electoral reform package that will be debated in Hong Kong’s Legislative Assembly on Wednesday.

Ho, who was unharmed, left in his car under a police escort. One officer was pushed to the ground during the chaotic scene, while a 19-year-old man was arrested for disorderly behavior and later released, police said.

“It was no big deal—just angry youths who expressed a lot of dissatisfaction and anger over my political position,” the veteran lawmaker told AFP after the incident.

“But this is a way for us to break the deadlock (on political reform) and move forward,” he added.

Ho had angered the youths by supporting a plan to raise the number of directly elected representatives in the legislative assembly, where half the number of seats are currently filled by Beijing-approved candidates.

The city’s government will unveil a reform plan on Monday, and it was reported Sunday that a compromise, approved by both Beijing and most of the assembly’s pro-democrats, had made likely its approval on Wednesday.

At present, only half of Hong Kong’s 60 legislative seats are directly elected by voters. The rest are picked by so-called “functional constituencies” which consist mostly of pro-Beijing professional elites.

The new plan, proposed by Ho’s Democratic Party, which has nine seats in the assembly, will allow a further five lawmakers to be directly elected to the functional constituency seats, according to the Sunday Morning Post.

Critics lambasted Tsang’s original plan because it stopped short of one-person, one-vote and proposed only an increase in the size of the assembly and the Beijing-appointed committee that chooses the city’s chief executive.

Democracy figurehead Martin Lee said the revised plan is a “huge improvement” on the government’s original blueprint, but warned that it did nothing to clarify how Hong Kong would achieve universal suffrage.

“This is a huge improvement on the government’s plan—there’s no doubt about that,” he told AFP. “But we must be careful and look to the future.”

Beijing has said that, at the earliest, universal suffrage can be ushered in for the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2017 and the legislative assembly in 2020.

That timetable has been criticized by the pro-democracy camp in Hong Kong, which was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 amid assurances from Beijing of broad autonomy for the territory.