Uri: The Knives Are Out!

Sure, it’s fun to watch Uri split itself into feuding factions, but is this really anything out of the ordinary for Korean politics?

Following across-the-board losses in last Saturday’s by-elections, a squabble has broken out among members of the governing Uri Party over who should take responsibility for the defeat. Party members posted hundreds of messages on the party’s Web site yesterday, saying the party’s chairman, Moon Hee-sang, and lawmaker Yum Dong-yun, who holds a leadership role, should resign over the electoral setback.

Some threatened to organize a signature drive to call for the expulsion of the current leadership. In the by-elections, six Assembly lawmakers and dozens of local government positions were filled, but the Uri Party lost in all races in which it fielded candidates. The internal struggle over the defeat appears to be expanding as a factional and ideological fight inside the party. Sixteen lawmakers belonging to a conservative faction of the party held a meeting Wednesday and said the election defeat resulted from the party system in which “ordinary” members select and approve candidates.

Feuds of this kind are inherent to Korean party politics, as are sudden shifts of coalitions and mass defections from one party to another. If you’re new to all of this, a quick primer: Roh Moo-Hyun is the current president and leader of the left-leaning Uri Party; Park Geun-Hye, daughter of Korea’s former military dictator, leads the “conservative” Grand National Party (GNP); two other signficant factions are the far-left Democratic Labor Party and the center-left Millenium Democratic Party (MDP), the latter being a remnant of the party led by ex-President and satisfied Nobel Committee customer Kim Dae Jung. Now, to really confuse you:

• During the 2002 election campaign, the MDP nearly came apart over corruption scandals and a bi-election beating in the wake of Roh’s nomination. Roh was seen (rightly, as we now know) as an untested, potentially unstable fringe figure.
• Also in 2002, Park Geun-Hye founded the Korean Coalition for the Future, which is now presumably a fully-digested part of the GNP.
• This.
• Again, in 2002, the emergence of a third-party candidate who tried to become a kingmaker, and failed miserably.
• Roh’s own defection from the MDP after the party really split for good in September 2003–less than a year after his election. The left faction of the MDP was established as the “Our Open Party,” or Uri Party, a shortened version of its Korean name.
• Another round of Uri bloodletting: the Foreign Minister resigns in January 2004 over a foreign policy rift.
• Roh’s goofy offers to resign, which were forgotten after the stated conditions came to pass.
• The GNP’s disastrous and transparently infantile impeachment of Roh.

Forgive me this cheap metaphor: the speed with which the ice breaks up and freezes again on the treacherous waters of Korean politics is reason for both caution and optimism–caution because its importance should not be overestimated, and optimism because it could set the stage for more North Korean intransigence to drive a substantial swing bloc back into the more centrist Millenium Democratic Party, or even to drive some Uri radicals over to the Democratic Labor Party.

Such fluid coalitions can make for a democracy that’s more vibrant than our own, albeit at the cost of stability, particularly in the hands of mercurial Korean voters. Given the fact that Uri has lost its majority in the Assembly, an Uri split would be highly significant and throw the initiative to the GNP.

This, of course, is the part where the GNP always blows it.

Yet with all indications being that Korea is entering an exceedingly critical phase in the crisis up North, Seoul will need a prompt resolution to any instability at the top, and fast.