Election result throws Korean left into chaos, me happy

Wow. This has to be really painful:

In Wednesday’s parliamentary by-elections, the ruling conservative Saenuri Party scored an thumping victory, winning 11 out of 15 seats and increasing its majority to 158 of 300 National Assembly seats. The major opposition party, New Politics Alliance for Democracy, won in only 4 districts and now has 130 seats in parliament.

The most surprising result was a conservative win in the Jeolla region in the southwest of the country, a traditional staunch stronghold of left-of-center parties. Lee Jung-hyun, a close confidant of President Park Geun-hye, became only the second conservative politician in the country’s history to win a seat in the region. [Wall St. Journal, Jaeyeon Woo]

Not just Cheolla, but South Cheolla.

The results showed that the political agenda put forward by opposition lawmakers and moves to portray the elections as another referendum on the government’s handling of the ferry disaster didn’t resonate with many voters. The ruling party also did well in local elections last month.

Yoo Ki-hong, a spokesman for the NAPD, said that the party would accept the results “heavily and humbly.” Speculation has already begun that the party’s two leaders, Kim Han-gil and Ahn Chul-soo, may stand down. [Wall St. Journal, Jaeyeon Woo]

And, true to that foreshadowing, both Ahn Cheol-Soo and Kim Han-Gill have resigned. Both men were relative moderates in the NAPD, and had tried to pull it back to the political center. In the short-term, their resignations could mean that the hard left will ascend in the NAPD. But Ahn and Kim are pragmatic politicians who believed that the hard left’s political base is a waning minority.

Another casualty was Sohn Hak-Kyu. In the early 2000’s, Sohn was a member of the ruling party’s predecessor, the Governor of Kyonggi Province, and his party’s most prominent advocate of the Sunshine Policy.

You really have to have lived in Korea to get a true sense of its regional animosities and how they’ve polarized Korea politically, but imagine a Kennedy winning a Senate seat in Mississippi, and you’ll get the general idea. Cheolla was the wellspring of a communist insurgency after World War II, and of the Kwangju Uprising and Massacre in 1980, which was carried out by men who rose from Park Chung-Hee’s inner circle before his assassination. Here’s a district voting map from the 2012 elections, which conservative Saenuri Party candidate Park Geun-Hye won.

The loss stings all the more because the Saenuri Party has hardly distinguished itself for the quality of its governance, to say the least. It botched the Saewol Ferry rescue, of course, but its greatest embarrassment must be its selection of personnel. And yet, the NAPD still loses mid-term elections against it.

Why do I dislike Korea’s political left so intensely? Because it isn’t liberal in its values or compassionate toward Korea’s most vulnerable — that is, North Koreans — and liberal, compassionate values are the source of my conflicted but persistent affection for what Americans call “classical liberals,” and Europeans call “democratic socialists.” I love their good intentions for humanity, even if I find some of their solutions impractical. The Korean left represents a hard, angry nationalism that we associated more with the right not so long ago (and which, sadly, still lives there).

It remains to be seen whether the result will give President Park more freedom to move away from her Clintonian North Korea policy and reduce her government’s financial support for North Korea. Or, whether she’s inclined to move away from that support even if she could.

~   ~   ~

Update: What would I really like to see come out of this election? A new political realignment that splits Korea’s liberals from its radicals and leaves the radicals marginalized.

Update 2: The Joongang Ilbo also thinks the resignations of Ahn and Kim leave the radicals predominant in the NAPD for now, but Moon Jae-In is positioning himself to take control of what remains of it, and if Moon is the pragmatic politician I think he is, he’s going to realize that the appeal of regionalism is wearing off, and that he’ll have to put forth an agenda that appeals to the mainstream. I hope that paves the way for a split that leaves radicals like Lim Soo-Kyung without a home in the NAPD. Hey, I hear the UPP has a vacancy.