Update: The Chosun is now all over the Sohn split from the GNP. It has a basic account of the divorce (already covered in the original post) and (naturally) slams him in an editorial, but the most interesting piece is a quick poll they did:
Sohn’s approval rating as a presidential hopeful rose to 8.2 percent, from 5.9 percent in a similar Gallup poll two weeks ago, while the number of undecided voters fell from 19.3 percent to 16.7 percent. The other GNP presidential contenders, former Seoul mayor Lee Myung-bak and former GNP chairwoman Park Geun-hye remained unaffected by Sohn’s departure, with approval ratings of 43.9 percent and 20.3 percent, virtually unchanged from a Gallup poll on March 3.
That is a pretty strong indication that Sohn will not be another Rhee In-jae. His bump in the polls is most likely coming from progressive voters who are disgusted with the leading candidates on the left but who could just not bring themselves to support someone running under the GNP banner.
If Sohn can get his poll numbers up to around 20% over the summer, he will most likely become the consensus “anybody but the GNP” candidate. If not, expect him to fade like our old friend Goh Kun did as his support bleeds off to whoever emerges from left.
BTW, I noticed in the poll that Kang Kum-sil (my favorite dark horse on the left) has moved into second place among prospective Uri candidates. She conducted a horrifically bad* campaign while running for mayor of Seoul last year and was crushed by Oh Se-hoon (despite some unrequested help from friends up north) but is still well-respected by many on the left.
*(Kang basically spent her campaign time bashing half of the city and telling the other half that she didn’t want to develop it. How are you going to win like that?)
Original Post: After a couple of months of pretending that he was seeking the Grand National Party nomination for president, Sohn Hak-kyu has finally bolted from the party (Korea Times):
“I decided to leave the GNP to create a new path for Korea, breaking the obsolete conservatives and incapable leftists.”
The question is what will Sohn do now?
The Uri Party would be a natural fit. They need someone to run under their banner and he needs to quickly build an organization. However, he might decide that Uri is fatally wounded and instead seek to lead one of the Uri splinter groups or even the new centrist party I mentioned in my previous post. In other words, I have no idea what Sohn will do next.
Can he win? He certainly has a better chance of uniting the Korean left than any of the pygmies running right now and a united left will start with a solid 30%. Throw in a September or October SK-NK summit (with North Korea on its best behavior through the election) and you have yourself a real race. You don’t have to be a novelist (scroll down) to see such a scenario playing out.
While the GNP would certainly rather have Sohn as an also-ran in the party than an opponent in the general election, I think this divorce is better for the party in the long run. If nothing else, it clears the way for someone like Kim Moon-soo to take the party’s reformist mantle and work on changing it into something other than a second home for cast aways of the Fourth Republic.
Sohn’s bolting the GNP might also help the party realize that they are not going to win by playing ”me too” to the Uri/Kim Jong-il love fest. So far, they have been pretty sensible (tying issues like a prospective summit on the North Koreans being good boys), but I would not put it past some of them to make a complete change of policy in reaction to a short-term shift in public opinion. With Sohn gone, there is little hope for the party to gain or keep votes from those who want to give more help to the Kim Jong-il regime, so there is little need to try.
Frankly, this divorce was long overdue.
5 Comments
So the political spectrum in Korea has come to this:
Labour - Sohn/Uri/Center united - GNP
For GNP this is an alarming situation. Sohn’s departure from GNP will probably make a large chunk of center-right voters turn away from GNP and seek more moderate alternatives like Sohn or Jeong Wun-Chan. In the past months Park and Lee kept iterating their ‘centerness’ to gain votes, but it seems all these efforts have been rendered useless by Sohn’s thoughtless move.
One thing that disappoints me about Sohn is that he doesn’t seem to have much of a reason to leave GNP other than the fact that he was not popular enough to get through the GNP primary. In the short term leaving GNP and joining the Uri scumbags may seem like an attract option because with them he is not an underdog anymore. But, like Lee In-Jae, he may end up just as a posterboy for center-left primary and end up losing to some Roh Mu-Hyun-like populist candidate. Even worse, if GNP happens to loses the election, he will be remember as a major obstacle for Korea’s chance to turn rightward (i.e less anti-US, less populist, less Commie).
The ideal scenario now would be that Lee and Park end their pointless bickering about their private lives. That will serve as a litmus test on whether or not GNP is as hopeless as I fear it is.
^ so many typos and grammatical errors, lol
Anyway, this just in:
Park said she blames GNP ’sojangpa’(reformist) politicians for Sohn’s departure. Sohn was one of sojangpa, and the majority of sojangpa promised to back Sohn’s bid for presidency last year. But as Lee’s popularity soared they turned away from Sohn and began supporting Lee. Sounds plausible, eh?
Meh, I though Sohn’s departure would make Lee and Park unite. Instead, they seem to see it as just another opportunity to point finger at each other.
The GNP is very much two people fighting inside a burning house. Whoever wins still loses.
IMHO, neither Lee or Park has the ingenuity to remake themselves as true leaders instead of being shaped by circumstances (and outside influences) into symbols of “too little” and “too late”.
I don’t think Sohn will be considered the next Rhee In-jae. He will take little conservative support with him and any support he builds over the next few months will come from the left.
What does is say about the Korean left that their greatest hope in the next election comes from the Grand National Party?