Did Lee Myung Bak Just Get His Mojo Back?
I’ve been meaning to write about the latest off-year election results in South Korea for the last several days. In what must be a welcome shift for Lee, unlike the June local and provincial elections, the ruling GNP scored what Yonhap called “a stunning victory over the opposition parties.”
In crucial by-elections gauging public sentiment toward the Lee Myung-bak administration midway through its term, the ruling Grand National Party yesterday scored precious victories in high-profile districts, making a successful political rebound from painful defeats in last month’s local elections.
Eight vacancies in the National Assembly were filled through yesterday’s elections, and victories of two advisers of President Lee were confirmed last night in Seoul and North Chungcheong, as well as two more victories in Incheon and South Chungcheong. [Joongang Ilbo]
The big race, in my wife’s home district, put Lee Jae-Oh back into the National Assembly.
The Democrats were clearly disappointed. Party officials’ faces became tense as the vote count progressed. Reflecting such a mood, DP Chairman Chung Sye-kyun only visited the party’s headquarters around 10:10 p.m. “I and the party’s leadership did our best,” Chung said. “We humbly accept the outcome.
It’s interesting to contrast the general lack of media interest in these results to the broadly reported consensus that the June local elections represented a “rebuke” by voters of Lee Myung Bak’s supposed “hard-line” policy toward North Korea (any reports of which are interpretive hallucinations).
What can I make of this change? There are several possibilities:
* These elections chose members of the National Assembly, not local executives. In other words, this time, the issues were national, not local. This is where the Cheonan Incident gains some direct relevance.
* Lee is wisely backing off on his ambitious local projects, and there has been a new sacrifice in accord with this.
* Turnout was high, which may mean that more conservative voters turned out. The mid-term effect was suppressed. Maybe the June elections shook some of them out of their complacency.
* The elections were held just as the U.S. and Korean navies held exercises that drew the predictable North Korean threats and much whining from the Chicoms. They also began as South Korean newspapers began to report that the U.S. government would start a global pursuit of North Korean assets to block. This time, there’s actually a credible case for there being a “hard line” to rebuke. And yet there was no rebuke.
As interesting as these theories are to me, a more likely one is that South Korean politics are just unstable and unpredictable, and that any efforts to make enough sense of them to achieve any predictive value are doomed.