The First New Political Party of South Korea’s Election Season Is Announced

On September 21st, I said this:

The jockeying for the South Korean presidential race has started. Like mercurial gobs, parties split into factions and clump together again. The Joongang Ilbo has an interesting article that suggests potential splits in both the Grand National and Uri parties. . . . I’m actually hoping for splits and ferocious ideological power struggles in both parties, particularly the GNP. The Uri’s fresh ideas are all wrung out, and the GNP’s fresh ideas are all stultified and bricked up behind a reactionary wall of defensive politics.

Sooner than I had expected, it’s already happening. Chungchong Province, feeling left out of South Korea’s regional factionalism, now has a party of its own, and it’s apparently trying to usurp the forgettable United Liberal Democrats for the coveted position of kingmaker. It’s not what I’d hoped for:

The new, tentatively named “People’s Central Party,” has been in the works since Mr. Sim first spoke of his plan last March. The region was once the stronghold of Kim Jong-pil’s United Liberal Democrats, which fell on hard times after Mr. Kim’s retirement from politics.

The conservative Grand National Party has its base in the southeastern Gyeongsang provinces, while President Roh Moo-hyun’s more liberal Uri Party has its roots in the rival southwestern Jeolla provinces.

Mr. Sim left the United Liberal Democrats in March to rally support for his grouping. He said yesterday, “Our people are tired of old-fashioned politics where confrontation and political artifice prevail.” He said the new party would “break out of the bondage of the left wing versus right wing and progressive versus conservative.”

Which means that the new party really doesn’t stand for anything except geography. My question of Andy Jackson, who has been following the story more carefully than me, is whose votes this new party will take away? Still not really sure about that, but I’ll try to find out.

I’ve never understood the whole regionalism thing anyway: first, isn’t Korea already divided in half? Second, I’ve always wondered why Koreans split over regionalism, politics, ideology, class, race, and almost every other conceiveable tribal divide, but almost never about religion. Sure, Korean Christians constantly try to convert each other into their own faith, which annoys and alienates some Buddhists (like Mrs. OFK, for one; personally, four years in Korea taught me what a generally tolerant group of people Christians in America really are, but that’s another post). Why the bitter divide over region and almost no strife over religion, which tends to divide so many other places?