After the Election: Mercurial Politics
Every Korean election year, the political parties’ festering grudges and tribal feuds, catalyzed by ambition, render the entire Korean political party system unstable. Parties shatter into mercurial gobs, collide, and reform.
============= The Center ==============
The first test tube hit the laboratory floor today:
Goh Kun made it clear on Thursday that he intended to run for the presidency, and the reaction in political circles has been swift. Especially with the Uri Party in disarray after its drubbing in local elections on Wednesday, analysts are expecting some wholesale realignments in Korea’s political parties, which are unstable even in the calmest of times.
So what will Goh’s platform be? What will he call his new party?
Goh, who is seen as a man of the middle, vowed to play “a leading role in bringing those who seek centrist reform and political pragmatism together. He told the source recently he intended to unite these centrist forces by establishing a national coalition.
A likely name is The National Coalition of Hope. Goh is likely to announce his candidacy for the presidential race next year at an event to launch the coalition, the source said. But the former PM is reportedly adamant that it is not a new political party but rather a public movement led by non-politicians like experts in different areas.
Goh says the coalition will work with centrists from whatever party. Goh is said to have had a series of meetings with politicians from the Uri Party, the Millennium Democratic Party and others to discuss the coalition.
You know, the problem with being a non-politician is that you lose that status the moment you run for high office. Who else remembers the excitement about Chong Mong-Joon? My wife still hisses venom about Kim Jong-Pil. More recently, the People’s Central Party, renamed the People First Party, tried to be a regionally oriented kingmaker. The GNP pulverized it at the polls Tuesday. Centrist politicians in Korea have a long history of trying to maneuver themselves into the “balancer” role, but they never win. Korean voters aren’t attracted to moderation. Middle-aged and older Korean voters are attracted to stability, which is not the same thing. Somewhat contradictorily, Korean voters also tend to be attracted to politicians who seem decisive, certain, and uncompromising. Having “radical” views is one way to cultivate that kind of image.
I predict that Goh Kun’s magic spell will be broken as soon as he’s forced to articulate some actual positions and raise funds for a campaign. I’m not saying I don’t like Goh; I don’t really know anything about him yet. I’m not saying he won’t be a factor in the next election; Korean elections are exceptionally unpredictable, and un-cola candidates tend to linger right up to Election Day, just as they do here. I’m saying that Goh Kun’s only constituency is people who know more and like less about the other options (which is why the conservative oppositon Grand National Party is reacting with immediate hostility). I question the potential for an Uri-Lite non-party to build a winning political base. And of course, Korea’s election laws may present some barriers to the political fiction of Goh Kun’s group not being a party.
Some Uri moderates have already signed on with Goh, but they’ll eventually have to give up one or the other. The winner’s bet is that they’ll leap from the Uri ashcan before it’s deposited on the ash heap.
============= The Left =============
Here is the most remarkable demographic trend of the week:
Mr. Roh and Uri also seem to have lost the young vote. About half of Koreans in their 20s supported the Grand National Party, as did half of those in their 30s.
The real action now centers around Korea’s political left and right, with the left being much more in a state of flux today. Maybe I should say, “despondency.”
Kim Du-kwan, a party member considered one of President Roh Moo-hyun’s cheerleaders, voiced some complaints yesterday, telling a radio audience, “The president shares responsibility with the governing party for the local election results.” He also suggested that he was opposed to re-merging with the Democratic Party, saying that Uri should remember its roots. (Uri was formed by a breakaway faction of that party.) He denied, however, that Mr. Roh was considering resigning from the party.
Another influential assemblyman, Moon Hee-sang, gave way to despair in a posting on his Web site. “Now is the time when we have to follow the public will, absolutely and without conditions. Even if the public wants us to break up the party, we should do it.” Mr. Moon was formerly Mr. Roh’s chief of staff and then Uri Party chairman, but resigned the latter post after last October’s crushing Assembly by-election defeat for Uri. On his Web site he continued, “The election results were a sentence of impeachment from the public against the administration and the governing party.”
Roh entered this week’s elections without the support of his own party, and with its second-most prominent politician, Comrade Chung, having turned from ally to adversary. That adversary has taken a dive, and absent yet another betrayal by a loyal subordinate, Goh Kun is now the only left-of-center politician in Korea who could challenge Roh. The field is open for the Korean left’s new standard-bearer to emerge from obscurity, and my bet is that he’ll espouse some fairly radical ideas. One name to keep an eye on is Kim Young-Choon, a leader of Uri’s anti-Roh faction.
============= The Right ==============
Here’s an excerpt from e-mail I received today, inviting me to a think-tank event in Washington next week:
The New Right Union (NRU) Mission Statement: “To expand freedom over the entire Korean peninsula and to build up the Republic of Korea into an advanced nation by positively inheriting the spirit of industrialization and democratization.”
As of March 7, 2006, membership in the NRU exceeded 30,000 people. The organizational goal of the NRU is to have 234 regional chapters and 100,000 members by the end of 2006 and 1,000,000 members by the December 2007 Korean presidential elections.
Nice words, but does the New Right Union really represent the New Right? Compare to this question I recently put to Daily NK Editor Han Ki-Hong:
Q. What organizations truly represent the values of the New Right?
A. I think that Liberty Union and New-Right Foundation which started recently represent the values of the New Right.
Consumer alert: the fact that a group uses the words “New Right” in its name is about as dispositive as putting the words “well being” on a pizza box. The New Right National Alliance described here is headed by the same Pastor Kim Jing Hong. Perhaps Kim was misquoted or taken out of context, but from that report, Pastor Kim appeared to have been sufficiently Old Right to garner the support of Park Geun Hye and Lee Myung Bak, and sufficienty silent on human rights and trade with the North to get the support of Sohn Hak-Kyu. No wonder, given that the NRNA has spoken unapologetically about the Korean right’s authoritarian past. What makes the real New Right different from the Old Right is that its leaders fought the Old Right autocrats. Just to confuse things even further, there’s also a New Right Network, which stands for God-knows-what.
That doesn’t mean I don’t prefer any one of the candidates in the previous paragraph to whatever replaces Uri, or even to Goh Kun. It just means that they only get my support by virtue of being the lesser of two evils.
In other words, the “New Right” is a nascent political movement that could either overthrow the existing political order or become Korea’s newest fad in deceptive marketing. As the name suggests, the New Right is more likely to be competitive among GNP voters than any other group, and the NRU is probably testing the waters for the formation of a political party and the nomination of a candidate. The clear choice for that candidate is Kim Moon-Soo, about whom I wrote more extensively here and here, and who holds the honor of being the only Korean politician of whom I’m thus far an avowed fan. Kim, a former union organizer and political prisoner, has consistenty and courageously fought dictatorship wherever he has found it throughout his life, and he is now North Korea’s foremost critic on human rights. Kim served three terms in the National Assembly, and of course, has just been elected governor of Kyonggi-do, the populous province that surrounds Seoul and borders a good-sized portion of the DMZ. That puts him in a position to make a presidential run, albeit in a crowded field.
There’s also a GNP faction on the left, led by former Kyongi-Do governor Sohn Hak-Kyu. Sohn fell out of my good graces by (1) being a starry-eyed advocate of unrestricted trade with North Korea, and (2) getting caught up in a corruption scandal. GNP lawmaker Won Hee-Ryong, who has bitterly attacked Park Geun-Hye’s leadership, goes into the same category. Park comes out of the election stronger than ever, which presents a setback for any faction that would challenge her. As of January, Sohn was pulling a mighty 0.6% in the polls, although it’s still very early to call that a real test of his strength.
The right’s biggest loser of the week is Park Geun-Hye’s main rival, ex Seoul Mayor Lee “Bulldozer” Myun Bak, who was leading Park by a narrow margin in January. I’m no fan of Park’s politics, but I don’t deny that her behavior after somebody nearly cut her throat recently was impressive: she earned a pinkie ring for being both cool and resilient, although I continue to believe that she’s mainly an attack dog who lacks a set of political principles. More surprisingly, she has managed to suppress any major splits or insurgencies in her own party while leading it. Lee is far from finished, and I’d still say he’s a very, very early favorite to win the entire contest.