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Change Your Life! |
Regionalism likely to prevail in South Korean parliamentary elections |
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News
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April 10, 2000
SEOUL, APR 9 (AP) - One candidate with a sword beheaded a crude effigy symbolizing corrupt politics. One has held mock funerals, with a coffin as a prop, for government sleaze. Another collects garbage in Seoul to show his record is clean.
Ahead of parliamentary elections on April 13, candidates from rival parties snipe at each other and trumpet reformist credentials, false or not. The cacophony obscures a fundamental question: what do the parties stand for and what are their differences?
South Koreans are proud of their turbulent break with authoritarianism a decade ago, and some even smile fondly when they recall the heady street protests and the wafting tear gas. But their young democracy, while firmly entrenched, is still growing up.
Despite a civic campaign against old voting patterns, many people are expected to choose candidates from their regions, regardless of their resumes or policies. Supporters still line up for meal coupons and other gifts at some campaign rallies.
A large number of South Koreans will sit out the vote, weary of graft and other scandals in government. At stake are 227 parliamentary seats chosen by direct vote and another 46 to be filled by a proportional representation system counting the total number of votes to each party.
"I'm sick of politicians, all corrupt and divisive. Even if I were to vote, I don't think it would help change anything," said Park Sung-joo, a 20-year-old real estate broker.
South Korean leadership remains fractured and chameleon-like more than two years after the election of President Kim Dae-jung, a former opposition leader and democracy champion who first ran for the nation's top office in 1971.
Kim's victory, based largely on support from his southwestern home region, Honam, was so slim that he was forced to form a ruling coalition with a conservative rival, Kim Jong-pil.
That alliance collapsed in February, and the president's minority Millennium Democratic Party, or MDP, will likely try to make a deal with its old partners after the vote. None of the four big parties is expected to win a majority.
The office of president holds enormous power in South Korea, a legacy of the hierarchical Confucian system that shaped political culture here hundreds of years ago. But a weak showing by Kim's party would undermine his clout in the remaining three years of his tenure.
His signature policies are economic reforms mandated by the International Monetary Fund in the wake of the Asian currency crisis, and the encouragement of business and other contacts to ease tension with communist North Korea.
Yet Kim's popularity has not surged in tandem with the rapid economic recovery that South Korea has enjoyed on his watch, probably because voters remain wedded to old political loyalties.
A leadership feud in March at South Korea's largest family-owned conglomerate, Hyundai, showed that corporate reform has a long way to go. Hyundai's 84-year-old founder, Chung Ju-yung, did not consult shareholders before appointing his fifth son, rather than his eldest son as expected, as his successor.
The main opposition Grand National Party, or GNP, commands a majority in the outgoing chamber and was in power during South Korea's authoritarian days. But it survived the transition to democracy, largely because of its traditional power base in the southeastern region, Youngnam.
Plagued by its own fissures, the opposition has seized on any issue that might help at the polls, including the recent spread of the deadly foot-and-mouth disease among pigs and cows in South Korea.
This week, a GNP official demanded the resignation of the agriculture minister, saying he was spending too much time on the campaign trail and not enough dealing with the livestock crisis.
Opposition legislators have also accused Kim and the ruling camp of cadging for votes by hinting at an imminent breakthrough in ties with North Korea. The two Koreas fought a war 50 years ago and Pyongyang refuses publicly to talk to Seoul despite a recent flurry of diplomatic contacts with other countries.
Yet some MDP officials have suggested a summit between Kim and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Il, could take place this year.
"It is their feeble attempt to influence voters ahead of the elections," said Chang Kwang-keun, a GNP spokesman.
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