Mercurial Politics, Part 2: The Left

[Update 5 Jun 06: Uri appears to be dissolving over a proposed merger with the Democratic Party. Scroll down for more.] 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.

============== Update 5 Jun 06 ===============

The ruling Uri party’s two wounded, cornered rivals just keep scratching, biting, and bleeding:

The Uri Party continued to crumble over the weekend after its defeat in Wednesday’s local elections. Following the lead of Chung Dong-young, the party’s former chairman, two more leaders resigned their posts yesterday. Cho Bae-sook and Kim Hyuk-kyu, both members of the party’s senior council, walked away from those jobs, which according to the party’s constitution means that an interim leadership panel must be formed. Had they stayed on, the runner-up to Mr. Chung in the party’s leadership elections three months ago, Kim Geun-tae, would have inherited the job.

Which sounds a lot like Cho and Kim doing this as a scorched-earth tactic to dynamite Kim Geun-Tae’s bridge to the Uri leadership.

The resignations yesterday were unexpected, and ran counter to efforts by some senior party members to keep things from unraveling that far. Saturday, 12 of those members, including Moon Hee-sang, a former chairman, and former Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan, asked the remaining leaders to stay on.

Their hopes fell on deaf ears. Ms. Cho and Mr. Kim told a press conference yesterday that they were determined to step down, and they took a parting shot at Kim Geun-tae, saying that if Mr. Kim became the new chairman, “it would not be a fundamental solution to the party’s problems.” Whether it was their intention or not, their departures triggered enough leadership vacancies that, under the party’s rules, the runner-up in the last leadership election could not inherit the post.

Kim Geun-Tae is currently the most highly placed member of the Uri Party’s leadership who is still loyal to Roh, and still opposed to a merger with the Democratic Party. Uri, of course, split with the Democratic Party, formerly the Millenium Democratic Party, over Roh’s differences with the latter. The DP’s remaining membership is viewed a relatively more moderate, even though the main proponent of a merger, Comrade Chung, had tried to campaign on Roh’s left on issues regarding North Korea and the creation of a South Korean welfare state. Either way, the DP merger seems destined to be typed onto the Uri Party’s death certificate. Although there’s probably an ideological component to it, I think the real reason for the controversy has more to do with the fact that most DP members have grudges against Roh himself, and that bringing them into whatever replaces the Uri Party would further weaken Roh’s influence over it.

Another possibility was suggested by other observers, who said the resignations could have been aimed at ousting another member of the party councel, [sic] Kim Du-kwan. He stirred up a political fuss near the end of the election campaign period by calling on Mr. Chung to resign his membership in the party for promoting the idea of a reunification of Uri with the Democratic Party. Kim Du-kwan said yesterday he was sorry he had “amplified conflicts within the party.”

“Conflict” is a dramatic understatement of a condition that’s better described as a general mutiny against President Roh Moo Hyun:

The Uri Party has found another outlet for its rage at the drubbing it took in the local elections: President Roh Moo-hyun.

Party legislators are seething in public about Mr. Roh’s dismissal of the party’s crushing defeat as not something he cares very much about.Over the weekend, party leaders and legislators took to the airwaves and gave print reporters an earful about their discontent. The critics, interestingly, include some politicians who have in the past been among Mr. Roh’s strongest defenders. Several critics questioned whether the party should continue its association with the president. Chung Bong-ju, an assemblyman, said, “The president did not understand public sentiment at all. Uri in this condition is sure to lose next year’s presidential election.” He added, “We have to reconsider whether we should continue to go on with the president.”

Lee Kye-ahn, another legislator who was a contender for the party’s nomination to be Seoul’s next mayor, echoed that sentiment. “Maybe Mr. Roh said that because he is the president,” Mr. Lee said, “But the governing party may well vanish after it fails in elections.” The litany continued. Another legislator, Moon Hak-jin, a former presidential secretary, said of Mr. Roh, “Now is the time when he should say he humbly accepts the public mind and is willing to correct what he has been doing wrong.”

Again, I think the odds are 50-50 that Roh will be gone soon, and they’re looking leaner than ever for him finishing his term. It’s hard for me to see how the Uri Party is going to survive this one, at least as it exists now, and I suspect they’ll be long gone by the end of 2006. But a year from now, the merger/renaming/reconstitution will probably result in a new post-Uri leftist party with most of the same supporters, members, and much of the same middle management. No one is taking any bets on the fate of the upper management.

P.S. Hat tip to Niels Footman for pointing me out to this post by Antti, noting that North Korea had made its endorsement official:

They [DPRK] strongly requested (or demanded, yoch’ông) that the students should vote for OOP. The northern representatives said that “GNP which is close to USA must not win. GNP can be beaten by voting OOP. If you vote Democratic Labor Party (DLP) it can become a meaningless vote (“dead vote” sap’yo), so vote OOP even if you’re a DLP member.”

And there you have it. North Korea keeps a quarter of a million people in concentration camps, starves millions of its people to death, and kills “racially impure” babies. It also endorsed Uri, and no one even thinks about asking Uri to repudiate that.