After losing two crucial elections last year, the opposition Democratic Party is struggling to transform into a completely different political group.
Nothing showed this better than the DP’s national convention Saturday, in which party members replaced its leadership ― composed mainly of the followers of two former center-left presidents, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun ― with more moderate, middle-of-the-roaders.
It was natural in this regard that the new DP leader, Rep. Kim Han-gil, called for changing “everything except the soul” of the 60-year-old party. The four-term lawmaker was also right when he vowed to shift priorities from ideological purity to bread-and-butter issues, although it remains to be seen how Kim would put his words into action.
Voters will see the initial signs of Kim’s leadership if he keeps his promises by appointing people to key party posts regardless of the factions they belong to, mixing the old guard with new faces only according to their abilities. It would be better still if the nation’s oldest political party renovates its operation by, for instance, naming candidates in bottom-up recommendation instead of the time-honored top-down appointment.
Most difficult of all, however, will be how to delineate the differences between themselves and the ruling Saenuri Party, which, despite its center-right ideological basis, has preempted the DP’s traditional platforms, such as better public welfare and regulation of family-controlled conglomerates. The DP’s defeats in both parliamentary and presidential polls were due to its resultant lurching toward more progressive policies on the economy and security, touching a deep-rooted fear of leftists among voters.
So it is understandable ― even inevitable ― for the DP to revise its platforms recently in ways to remove some leftist, or pro-North Korean, elements as conservatives say, by stressing the importance of free market capitalism and expressing concerns about human rights abuses in North Korea. After all, politics is the art of attracting more voters to each side, in which no amount of moral lecturing and ideological correctness can move the minds of voters whose foremost concerns are jobs and more stability.
The old liberal party under new leadership will have to vie with the governing conservative party over minute segmentation of voters with slightly different policies. It should, for example, fill the void left by President Park Geun-hye reneging on her election pledges by providing better welfare, stricter chaebol reform and better inter-Korean diplomatic initiatives.
Before moving further toward the center, however, the party ought to ponder what to keep and what to throw away among their original ideas.
And they must think about what the reason is for the public shunning the followers of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun: was it too much progressivism or too less of it? Polarizing incomes became most extreme under the conservative Lee Myung-bak administration but their seed were sown and grown under the two liberal presidents who unduly adopted Anglo-American neo-liberalistic policies.
The DP landed on the verge of collapse by signaling left and turning right. Doing the opposite ― at least economically ― could provide the party with new direction.