The Great Uri Crackup

First, I strongly recommend Andy Jackson’s district-by-district rundown of this week’s bi-elections at The Marmot’s Hole, although I could summarize by saying that, the Uri and DLP lost everywhere they should have won, and also lost everywhere else.

Here’s a breakdown of the composition of the new National Assembly:

144 Uri Party (leftist)
127 Grand National Party (conservative)
11 Democratic Party (fmr. Millenium Democratic Party, center-left)
9 Democratic Labor Party (stark-raving pinkos)
3 United Liberal Democrats
5 Independents
———————————————————————-
150 Needed for a Majority
299 Total Seats

Among those defeated was a former close aide of Roh himself, and Lee Sang Joo, whom the Korea Herald described as “a veteran politician.”

In the wake of this latest loss, disgruntled parliamentarians forced four of Uri’s top leaders to resign. The move came despite the entreaties of President Roh Moo Hyun.

Their resignation followed a post-mortem meeting where rank-and-file lawmakers blasted President Roh Moo-hun and Cheong Wa Dae for “arrogance” in telling them how to react to the rout. Roh said Thursday the defeat was a verdict on his government and asked the party not to be shaken but focus on the parliamentary session ahead.

“Why did the presidential office give guidelines to the party?” Rep. Yoo Seung-hee demanded. Lawmakers resoundingly rejected the president’s implicit request to maintain the current leadership under Moon for the time being.

Of all the things Roh can be accused of–hypocrisy, weakness, and soft-headedness come to mind–arrogance isn’t among them:

“I accept the results of the by-elections as an evaluation of the president’s state management,” he was quoted as telling his chief of staff, Lee Byung-wan. “I hope the Uri Party will not get engaged in an internal feud and, instead, focus on the ongoing Assembly session.”

Roh is obviously worried about intraparty chaos:

“Even though there may be personal opinions and objections, I hope they do not grow into conflict within the party that would worry the people. . . .”

The president had not issued any kind of statement after the even more embarrassing defeat in by-elections in April, when Uri lost six contests for vacant seats, five to the Grand Nationals and one to an independent candidate.

Asked about the change of strategy, Mr. Kim said, “The president was stressing that the Assembly session is the most important job for the governing party at the moment, with pending bills on real estate policies, more rice imports, national security reforms and so on.”

Thus, Roh’s influence over his own party is now insufficient for him to retain control over it, and not for the first time. South Korean partisan politics are a highly unstable affair in any event, but once the jockeying for a big election year begins, they’re like old, sweaty dynamite.

With Roh’s position weakened, the vultures are circling:

Another was more specific, saying that Chung Dong-young, the [anti-] unification minister, and Kim Keun-tae, the health minister, would probably go back to party leadership positions. Both are considered strong contenders for the party’s presidential nomination in 2007.

Chung, whose pact with Satan became public last year, was not immediately available for comment.

Why did this happen? The Korea Herald speculates that it was a voter rejection of Roh’s intiative–which followed yet another recent electoral disaster–to form a coalition government with the opposition Grand National Party. It also suggests that there has been a voter backlash against some of the recent antics of Korea’s extreme left, about which the ruling party, itself a lefty outfit, has been noticeably ambivalent. The young voters who put Roh in office in 2002 and who have dominated the national debate ever since didn’t show up, despite the government’s lowering of the voting age to 19 for the first time. Overall turnout was fairly high, mainly among older, more conservative voters.

The other enjoyable misery of the week is that of the Trotskyites in the Democratic Labor Party. The Korea Times suggests that recent union corruption scandals played a part. DLP activists sounded as if they were recriminating over unfinished power struggles:

“We should have paid more attention to the livelihood of non-regular workers and low-income earners in Ulsan, instead of focusing too much on the unionized workers of the big plant,” said Rep. Sim Sang-jung, vice floor leader of the DLP.

“Something unimaginable just took place in Ulsan, which is practically the land of laborers,” a DLP official said. “The defeat is feared to seriously hurt the party and its leadership.”

As a result of the by-elections, the DLP has nine seats in the 299-member unicameral legislature. Except for Rep. Kwon Young-ghil, who was elected in Changwon, South Kyongsang Province, eight other DLP legislators were elected under the proportional representation system in April last year.

A political party is required to maintain at least 10 parliamentary seats in order to submit its own bill to the Assembly.

Guess the little ones will have to wait another year for their red neckerchiefs. Dee-lish.

This is where I become ambivalent about it all. Sure, I have schadenfreude to spare for Baron von Harkonnen here and his Uri boys losing seats, but at at time when the GNP has been at its Old Right worst, it will now find reinforcement for its bad behavior. Based on what I’ve read, it wasn’t anything the GNP did that led to these results; this was a backlash against what Uri and its imputed supporters have been doing. In fact, I have little grasp of what Park Geun-Hye actually stands for. It’s entirely possible to care very little for the GNP and still despise Uri. Take me as a case in point, in fact. I’m not a Korean, but I read the same papers they do.

What is the GNP then, except the un-Uri? It’s probably easier to find the answer by the process of elimination. What I’m not seeing is the emergence of a genuinely liberal wing within the GNP”“I use that term in the classic John Stuart Mill sense”“at least soon enough for the 2007 election. What I forecast instead is a bloody fight between two GNP candidates, the bootylicious (but unprincipled) Park Geun Hye and Lee “Bulldozer” Myung-Bak, a contest that promises much heat and little light. Both are ideological heirs to Park Chung-Hee, leaving genetics out of it for the moment. The result will be an Old Right vs. New Left contest in 2007. For the GNP, that’s a demographic recipe for disaster, because Koreans who still think fondly of Park’s rule (or Kim Young Sam’s, for that matter) are dying off. Neither Park nor Lee really has a coherent or visionary message about how to achieve unification or keep Korea out of the Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere. Even if, as Norbert Vollertsen reports, the Old Right is starting to adopt the human rights cause, it lacks the charisma, credibility, and principle to bring it off.