The South Korean political struggle is by no means over with the presidential elections of March 2022. The next important date for everyone in this country is the elections to local authorities, which will be held on June 1, 2022. At stake are 17 posts of heads of regions (governors, mayors) and thousands more local administrative, legislative and educational positions. The last local elections ended with a landslide victory for the Democratic Party, which won 14 of the 17 posts.
Although in the by-elections a year ago, the Conservatives gained a serious advantage by seizing the posts of mayors of Seoul and Busan (the capital and the second most important city), their term of office is ending and they will need to be re-elected.
It is widely believed that the Democratic Party will win in the so-called Honam district, i.e. the provinces of North and South Jeolla and the city of Gwangju. The Power of the People, respectively, intends to get seats in the provinces of North and South Gyeongsang, as well as in the cities of Daegu, Ulsan and Busan.
Meanwhile, the defeat in the presidential election did not faze the Democrats at all. Rather, they have become stronger and regrouped. Fortunately for them, in absolute numbers Lee Jae-myung received more votes than Moon Jae-in five years ago. As per tradition, the former leadership of the party led by Song Young-gil resigned and was replaced by Moon’s supporters led by Yoon Ho-joong, who created an emergency committee that will work until the local elections in June.
The Democrats are particularly successful on “women’s street,” because many believe that the promised dissolution of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family by the conservatives will mean ignoring this block of problems altogether.
Consolidating the success, the Democrats appointed a 26-year-old Internet activist Park Ji-hyun as the co-chairman of the party. She is known for almost single-handedly exposing the biggest scandal of recent years related to the presence in the South Korean segment of Telegram of chats with sexual exploitation of minors, up to rape on camera. According to the author, Park can become the banner of the youth policy of the Democrats and a kind of “answer” to Lee Jung-seok, who is the representative of the interests of young men.
However, shortly after that, President Moon Jae-in and other party members sent wreaths of condolences to the funeral of the father of the former governor of South Chungcheong Province, Ahn Hee-jung. The one who in 2019 was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for sexually assaulting a secretary. Formally, the father is not responsible for the son, but many people were offended by this fact.
The legitimacy of the emergency committee is being questioned, since Yoon is one of those responsible for the party’s inability to win the elections. His statement that the Democratic Party and the candidate were innocent victims of fake news has already caused a stir, although the Democrats and the Blue House used this weapon in equal measure. However, Yoon Ho-joong said that the party plans to focus on reforming the media “to ensure national unity, the right of the people to information and the independence of the press.” In other words, it is supposed to revive the controversial legislation on media reform, which failed in September 2021 amid growing public criticism. The bill aimed to impose strict restrictions on journalists by imposing exorbitantly high fines for factual errors in reports, in addition to the current legal norms and arbitration systems.
Besides, Yoon’s detractors recall that during the internal party struggle, he rather drowned Lee Jae-myung and definitely did not give him proper support, which is why he bears great responsibility for the defeat in the presidential election. And in general, Lee should now become the head of the party.
The latter, by the way, is unusual, since in most cases candidates who have lost presidential elections spend at least a few months in the shadows to take responsibility for disappointing results.
On the other hand, MP Park Hong-geun, who is considered close to Lee Jae-myung, was elected head of the parliamentary faction of the Democrats. To choose a new party leader, it took 3 rounds of voting. This is important because, although the Conservatives won +4 seats in the by-elections to the National Assembly and have 110 seats without the People’s Party, the Democrats still have 172 out of 300.
As for the Conservatives, it can be noted that although Yoon Seok-yeol managed to reconcile the other factions with his candidacy as president, this does not prevent different factions from conflicting with each other and nominating their own candidates for the same seat.
It is assumed that on the eve of future elections, the nomenclature of political parties will once again change. The Power of the People is going to unite with the People’s Party of Ahn Cheol-soo, who may be planning to become the leader of all conservatives by starting the process of updating the party and its conditional “centralization.”
The Democrats are going to unite with the centrists from the New Wave Party and the so-called “Open Democratic Party,” where those representatives of Moon Jae-in’s inner circle who were too exposed in corruption and other scandals were exiled to. In any case, their leader Choi Kang-wook is mostly known as the person who bombarded the prosecutor’s office with parliamentary requests in order to initiate another criminal case against Yoon Seok-yong.
The official announcement of candidates is just beginning and will end in late April – early May, but it is already noticeable that if earlier the main topic for discussion of local elections was the question of who will become the next mayor of Seoul, this time the race for the post of governor of the capital Gyeonggi province took center stage, whose governor was Lee Jae-myung before he decided to become president. Relatively speaking, “this is a war for the legacy of Lee Jae-myung.”
Lee himself, for obvious reasons, is not running this time (apparently, as there have been no statements about this from the ex-governor himself yet). However, at least two 2022 presidential candidates are taking part. Firstly, the centrist Kim Dong-yeon, a former finance minister and head of the New Wave Party. His program seemed to the author the most interesting and balanced, but due to the absence of a third force in the politics of the ROK, he had a rating of about 1% and eventually withdrew in favor of Lee Jae-myung.
Kim Dong-yeon has spent almost half of his life living in provincial cities working as a civil servant and university president. Given the upcoming unification of the parties, he will probably represent the Democrats.
Secondly, the main Conservative candidate is Yoo Seong-min. He is considered a center-right, and at one time he opposed Park Geun-hye and even broke away from the main Conservative Party at the head of his group, took fourth place in the 2017 presidential election with 6.76% of the vote, but eventually returned to the Power of the People and became the third most important rival of Yoon Suk-yeol in the internal party elections. Yoo Seong-min also created the current leader of the Conservative Party, Lee Jung-seok.
Finally, such an interesting personality as former MP Kang Yong-seok, who runs the right-wing Hoverlab news channel with more than 900,000 subscribers on YouTube, which makes numerous scandalous accusations against celebrities and politicians, has joined the governor election race. His “victims” also include Lee Jung-seok, who is apparently too left-leaning. 12 years ago, in 2010 and even before MeToo, the Conservative Party stripped him of his membership for obscene and sexist remarks about female news show hosts. Kang was going to join its ranks again, but Lee Jung-seok rejected the application.
As for the elections in Seoul, the current mayor Oh Se-hun firmly holds his post. He is a good business executive and administrator, and the most reasonable politician among classical conservatives. Oh Se-hun won a landslide victory in the mayoral by-election in 2021 by defeating his Democratic Party rival with 57.5% to 39%. This was a dramatic shift compared to the 2020 parliamentary elections, when the Democratic Party won a landslide victory in all but four districts of Seoul. As a result, many consider the mayor of the capital one of the strongest candidates to carry the flag of the party in the 2027 presidential elections.
The Democrats have not yet decided on an opponent. Options are being considered for Park Yong-sun, the former minister of small and medium-sized businesses and startups, who lost the 2021 mayoral election to Oh Se-hun, and Im Jong-sok, the former head of the presidential administration. But they are not particularly eager to fight a losing battle.
However, this round of struggle is just beginning and the next summary from the fronts is waiting for the audience at least when the parties decide on the main candidates for key posts. In any event, the electoral process and the inter-party struggle in South Korea remain an amazing sight.
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”.
