The Marmot’s Hole

Like many people who have been following Korean politics, I have known for a while that Our Open Party (Uri) would not last.  To be specific, I having been saying that the party would break up by the end of 2007 since at least May of 2006.

Of course, it did not take a genius reading tea leaves to figure out that Uri would break up.  It was more a matter of seeing the writing on the wall.

And break up it did (Chosun Ilbo):

President Roh Moo-hyun and the ruling Uri Party’s presidential hopefuls have started playing a political game over control of the agenda for the presidential election next year. Uri Party chairman Kim Geun-tae and former chairman Chung Dong-young in an emergency meeting on Thursday agreed to create a new party, to be called the People’s Party.

The Korea Times says that about 80% of Uri Party members will join Kim and Chung.

From its beginning, Uri faced internal contradictions that made a break-up almost inevitable.  The first biggest of those was that they were a regional party that was trying to act like a national party.  Roh pushed for an end to regionalism and the Uri party got an impressive third of the votes in the Gyeongsang area, but as this map shows, it was still GNP country.  They also picked up most of the seats in the ’swing areas’ of Chungcheong and the capital region, but that was also a temporary boost.  Despite having an up swell of support brought on by public revulsion of Roh’s impeachment, they were still not able to alter the reality (or shift the paradigm, if you will) of Korean regional-based voting. 

That brings up the second, related, contradiction.  Uri was in fact a Jeolla-based party but they did not have firm control of Jeolla voters.  They had to share that region’s voters with the Democratic party.

The third contraction was that they were one of three parties on the left trying to fight a united conservative party.  They could not just stick with their progressive base because there are just not enough progressive votes to divide between Uri, the Democrats and the Democratic Labor Party.  They could not move the center without losing their more radical supporters to the hard-core DLP.  The ‘landslide’ of 2004 masked that reality for only one election.

They had wounded the Democratic Party in 2004 but failed to kill it.  The Democrats just waited in for Uri to spend itself before striking back.  That time came in the local elections last spring, which the GNP dominated.  The Democrats picked up as many seats as Uri, despite having about half the total voter support.  As I said back then:

Do you want to know why Uri likes proportional representation?

The Chosun [note: dead link] has the total numbers by party:  GNP 49.51%, Uri 22.22%, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP)  13.04%, the Democratic Party 11.46%.

So, Uri got twice the votes as the Democrats but so far only have half the major seats.  I saw a graphic on TV this evening that the Democrats are also picking up as many city council seats as Uri.

The problem for Uri is that they lack a solid regional base.  Most of the Democrat’s support is concentrated in Jeollanam-do and Gwangju, while Uri’s 22% is spread over different parts of the country.  The emergence of the Goh Kun’s People First Party the the Chungcheong provinces has cut Uri’s support there (the PFP’s candidate is pulling about 10% in Daejeon).  They never really made good on their hope to make serious inroads into the GNP’s support [in] the eastern half of Korea.  That leaves Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon, which also went for th GNP this year.

The net effect is that their 22% vote total may very well earn then less than 10% of the available seats up for grabs once all the votes are counted.

What I think this means (and my bet is still open)

This is not rocket science:  Running three progressive parties against a united conservative party in a first-past-the-post system is a losing proposition.  Something has got to give or the GNP is going to take the Blue House next year and the Kuk Hoe in 2008 without much of a fight.

The Democrats are not going anywhere.  They can just hold up in fortress Jeolla.  The DLP, being a party of true believers, is not going to close shop any time soon.  That leaves Uri.  It has the Blue House and a plurality in the Kuk Hoe but it is in an extremely difficult position for the long-term.  The previously mentioned lack of a regional base is taking a toll on its support and they will win fewer seats than the GNP even if they got their support levels up to the mid 30s.  To make matters worse, they are faction-riven even by Korean standards.

The new party will remove the first two contradictions I mentioned earlier in this post.  Roh is right about the move as a step back to regional-based politics, but that is what the left needs to do in order to have a chance of winning the presidential election next year.

But if the new party chooses Goh Kun as their standard barer, they are headed for a fool’s paradise.  With Goh’s self-pronounced center-right stance, true-believing progressives will look elsewhere and the Democratic Laber Party’s candidate will get at least 10% of the vote.  Supporting a Goh candidacy is playing not to lose and that will rarely win you ballgames.  If your guy loses the Cheongwadae, does it really matter if he got 30% or 40%.  Perhaps they are counting on the Park Geun-hye/Lee Myung-bak struggle to split the GNP next December; I don’t know for sure, but this is not the time to play it safe.

What the new party needs is someone who will unite progressives under his or her banner (Keeping DLP numbers down in the 5-7% range) without spooking moderates.  After five years of Roh, that will not be easy but it is a better bet than picking an almost sure loser in the hope that the other side will make an even bigger mistake.

UPDATE:  I read somewhere that Kim Geun-tae would like to have former SNU head Chung Un-chan as the standard barrer of the new party.