Local by-elections failed on April 7, 2021; the Conservative Party regained Seoul and Busan, South Koreas’ most prominent cities. This result has caused specific changes in the leadership of political parties in the Republic of Korea and the departure of the administration’s aggravation of factional struggle.
One example was a high-profile story when five freshmen DP lawmakers in their 20s and 30s, elected for their first term, cited the administration’s Cho Kuk scandal as a key factor in the election defeat and other similar elements of Moon Jae-in politics. For this, hard-line pro-Moon members of the party mobilized to flood their phones and Twitter accounts, as well as in-house Party chats, with critical messages accusing them of treachery and ingratitude for several days. One of the deputies was even forced to apologize and repent.
In early May, the Democrats chose a new leader, who was not a representative of the Moon Jae-in faction. Song Young-gil is a former Mayor of Incheon, known, in particular, as a great supporter of cooperation between the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation. According to the vote results with the result of 35.6%, he was ahead of his competitors – Hong Young-pyo (Moon’s minion) and Woo Won-sik, who received 35.01% and 29.38% of the votes.
Song Young-gil will hold this position until at least the March 2022 presidential election. This means that Song himself will not go to the polls. Still, his opinion may be pretty important in determining who will be the official candidate of the Democratic Party in future elections. So far, the list is led by the Governor of Gyeonggi Province, Lee Jae-myung, who seems to the author to be an even more left-wing populist than Moon, successfully avoided the administration’s attempts to take him out of the game. And candidates directly linked to Moon, such as former Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun or former Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae, do not score even 5% in opinion polls.
However, Song Young-gil’s capacity as party chairman will be pretty limited. He will have to coordinate with the five members of the Party’s Supreme Council. The latter, unlike him, are classic supporters of Moon Jae-in.
Therefore, it should be noted Song Young-gil’s statement that he “would focus on harmonizing the different voices within the party, and pay more attention to the opinions of the general public, recognizing the criticism”. In contrast, the Party’s Supreme Council already states that the Together Democratic Party should support the president and continue to push the presidential reform package at the same speed.
Suppose Song manages to reach an agreement with other factions. In that case, the Democratic Party will gently or not so gently dissociate itself from Moon over the next year. It is possible that next year, for this purpose, it will ceremonially change its name.
The Conservative Party, which for the same reasons has repeatedly changed its name, currently called the People Power Party is in no less, if not more trouble. It’s not the dizziness of success, but a much more difficult situation. Before the election, it was led by Kim Chong-in, a professional political strategist who had worked with both Moon Jae-in and Park Geun-hye. Still, it seems that he failed to shift the party to a more centrist side, dissociate himself from conservatives’ image as supporters of Park Geun-hye, and form a positive agenda beyond the thesis “Moon is wrong in everything, it should be different.” In addition, apparently, he failed to establish contact with other faction leaders, especially given that under the influence of scandals related to the Moon administration, the number of supporters of the convicted ex-president Park Geun-hye began to increase. Their weight within the party started to grow.
As a result, the supporters of the ex-president are quite an influential faction, whose opinion can not be ignored but also raise their heads. On April 20, lawmaker Suh Byung-soo, who is considered the pro-Park faction leader, questioned the legality of the impeachment, saying that it is hard to believe that she committed such illegal actions. The next day, when the president received the newly elected Mayors of Seoul and Busan, they openly asked for pardons for Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye for the sake of national unity. In such a situation, even the conservative media noted that Kim Chong-in, while leading the party, opposed the pardon and apologized for the fact that Park brought the situation to impeachment. The latest poll on this topic shows that 50.2% are against the amnesty, and 44.8% of respondents are in favor, so conservatives should be careful.
As a result, about 15 people ran for the post of party chairman. After a two-stage vote (in the first round, no one took a qualified majority), Kim Ki-hyeon became the new party leader. He is the former mayor of Ulsan and the same person who was “left” due to the special operation of the Blue House, so that this cushy job was taken by Song Cheol-ho, a close friend of Moon Jae-in back in the 1980s.
Recall what happened then: before the March 2018 elections, the police raided the offices of Kim’s aides, and the tip on their corrupt activities came from the office of the president. In addition, the President’s Office of Civil Affairs monitored Kim Ki-hyeon for mudslinging. The high-profile coverage of a criminal case of corruption in the typical Korean style, when the media declares a person guilty, and “evidence will be presented soon,” led to the fact that in the elections on June 13, 2018, Kim lost. However, he was 15% ahead of his nearest rival before the investigation began.
However, when the election was over, Kim’s aides were cleared of all corruption charges. Ah, the facts were not confirmed, but Kim still demanded justice. It turned out that the Blue House specifically sent two subordinates to Ulsan to check the progress of the investigation. They say that such a trip happened after the prosecutor’s office canceled the order to arrest Kim for lack of evidence of a crime. Visitors from the capital pressed hard on all the buttons so that the concoction of the case would be revealed only after the elections. And the later investigation stalled after one of these inspectors was found dead on December 1, 2019, just before the Prosecutor’s Office was going to question him.
In the Korean media, Kim is called a centrist and/or a supporter of Lee Myung-bak, but what matters to the author is that his life story is unlikely to make him inclined to compromise with the Democrats.
The next milestone in forming the conservative policy is the National Party Congress, scheduled for June. In the run-up to this event, the new leadership of the party must solve three critical problems.
The first of these is where to go after all. The most prominent conservative opposition party needs a complete overhaul by breaking itself from the past from one perspective. Only this will allow it to expand its support base at the expense of younger and more moderate voters. Another point of view suggests that the changes in the conservatives’ political agenda under Kim Chong-in did not particularly affect its success. In the mayoral elections, the population still voted not so much for the Conservatives, but against the Democrats. But the movement towards the center will lead to the fact that the conservatives will lose part of their political identity and part of the support of a relatively active category of the electorate, which occupies far-right positions. First of all, these are the supporters of Park Geun-hye, whose positions are being strengthened, as evidenced by the statement of Suh Byung-soo.
In addition to the conditional centrists and conditional “Park supporters” some faction leaders who a year ago or earlier “signed in complete incompetence” will also return to politics. First of all, Hwang Kyo-ahn led the party until it failed in the April 2020 parliamentary elections. The second such candidate is Kim Moo-sung, the former chief ideologue of the conservatives and the author of the odious project of a single history textbook. He was also far more right than Park Geun-hye. Still, against the background of the Candlelight Revolution, together with his faction, he formed a new Bareun Party (can be conditionally translated as Justice). However, the project was stillborn, and as a result, Kim returned back. Some of the other politicians joined the Ahn Cheol-soo party.
The second important task is to determine whether the conservatives will merge with the People Power Party in the run-up to the presidential election. According to the supporters of the parties’ unification, this will finally allow the right to avoid the image of outspoken conservatives and heirs of Park Geun-hye. Ahn Cheol-soo gets the opportunity to run for president election, citing that there are no popular and clean leaders among the conservatives. On the other hand, the People Power Party is a minor force, and joining it will shift the conservatives’ overall agenda to a more centrist direction. Park’s supporters will be against it. Plus, Ahn still has a reputation as a “professional spoiler” who withdrew his candidacy at the right time and a failed politician who was nominated from the left, then from the center, and now from the right.
However, suppose there is a split among the conservatives in this regard. In that case, it will instead increase the chances of Ahn since a situation similar to the victory of Lee Myung-bak in 2008 may occur. Then the classic conservative leader of the past years, Lee Hwi-jae, went to the polls independently. Lee Myung-bak was voted for by both those dissatisfied with Roh Moo-hyun and those who did not want to see a classic right-wing politician as president.
The third important issue for the conservatives is the interaction with former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl which Kim Chong-in strongly opposed. Yoon consistently ranks first or second in public opinion polls. Still, from the point of view of several experts, such an alliance would be political suicide for both Yoon and the conservatives, especially since Yoon earned the first part of his reputation as a harsh and fair prosecutor in opposing the Park Geun-hye regime. For the same reason, Yoon Seok-youl is not wanted by the supporters of both of the arrested ex-presidents.
However, Yoon has not yet declared his participation in the presidential race. The Moon administration will take him out of the game with the help of a draft law under which high-ranking officials can run for president only a year after resigning. If the law is passed, Yoon will be formally removed from the list, but much will depend on the political situation. However, we will write about “what the Prosecutor’s Office has there” separately because the author has something to say about the new Prosecutor General and how the situation develops with several relevant scandals, which he continues to observe.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, leading research fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of the Far East at the Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
