Yeongnam's strong presidential politics

By Kyung Moon Hwang

Based on last year’s parliamentary elections, this column suggested the beginnings of major shifts in regional electoral patterns. A year later, it turns out that things have not changed much at all, at least in terms of presidential politics.

Following an extraordinary half-year, South Koreans now face a sudden presidential election, and already, after a couple of weeks, the four main parties have chosen their candidates. And discouragingly, at least for those who desire major reform, the four candidates all hail from the same region: Yeongnam, or the Gyeongsang provinces.

Granted, two of the four come from northern Gyeongsang, centered in Daegu, and two from the south, centered in Busan. And granted, only the two candidates from Busan stand a real chance, according to recent opinion polls. But this raises further questions.

For example, why do both leading candidates, who are left of center in their ideological positions, have roots in Busan, which is not the nation’s capital or largest city? Such an outcome continues historical patterns, however, as the two previous presidents from Busan, Kim Young Sam and Roh Moo-hyun, were both on the “liberal” side of the political spectrum. Likewise the five previous presidents from northern Gyeongsang, including the just-deposed Park Geun-hye, were undoubtedly “conservative”.

Such a history takes us to the larger issue of how and why Yeongnam has dominated presidential politics, if not South Korean politics as a whole, for nearly the country’s entire existence. Since the 1960 popular overthrow of the first president, Syngman Rhee, whose roots were in Hwanghae province of northwestern Korea, nearly every president with real authority (thus, not counting Yun Boseon and Choe Gyuha) has come from the Gyeongsang provinces.

The single exception was Kim Dae-Jung, from neighboring and rival Honam, or the Jeolla provinces, and he barely won amid an economic crisis in 1997, after having lost three previous presidential elections to Yeongnam candidates. In sum, it’s been very hard for someone outside Yeongnam to become president, a pattern that will continue next month.

Equally remarkable is the fact that none of these presidents, dating back to the founding of South Korea in 1948, has come from Seoul. (Park Geun-hye came closest, as she had spent almost her entire life in the capital, but her familial ties to her birthplace of Daegu were more important to her electoral success.) The rapid urbanization over the past half-century, which produced the megalopolis surrounding the capital, drew migrants from across the country, and therefore the local identity of the capital’s citizens probably remained weaker than the ties to their original home regions.

This explanation is not incorrect, but a fuller answer, based on a thorough analysis of more historical evidence and data, is likely a lot more complicated. The same holds true for Yeongnam’s dominance, but we can begin exploring this issue by turning to some broader verifiable patterns in modern Korean history.

First is the fact that Yeongnam has long enjoyed a population advantage. Although the capital region contains nearly half of the country’s people today, the Gyeongsang provinces have a lot more than the other regions, with about a quarter of South Korea’s population, compared to about ten percent for Honam. In fact this relative strength in numbers has actually decreased over the years.

According to the South Korean government’s online statistical portal, in 1970 Yeongnam had an even greater percentage of the country’s population of 30 million, exceeding that of the capital region. Go further back, to 1955, and one finds that Yeongnam, which held around one-third of the country’s population of nearly 11 million, dwarfed that of the Seoul area, which was smaller than even Honam.

The concentration of people in Busan, which during the Korean War served as South Korea’s capital and a destination for refugees, including those from the northeast, explains some of this. The family of presidential candidate Moon Jae-in was among these wartime newcomers to Busan, for example. For others, Busan functioned as a dynamic regional capital that pulled in people from surrounding areas. This seems to have been the case for presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-su.

Busan grew rapidly also due to its Japanese connections during the preceding colonial period. Located closest to Japan, this port city became the gateway for Japanese domination and for those in the southern part of the peninsula wanting access to Japan. This resulted in Busan’s suddenly overtaking the traditional capital of Yeongnam, Daegu, within a couple of decades in the early 20th century.

But again, for the Yeongnam region as a whole, the population advantage was firmly grounded in history. Published official statistics from as far back as 1907 show that the two Gyeongsang provinces, having been recently divided for administrative purposes in 1896, were by far the largest in the entire peninsula, not just the southern half. And the numbers from the 1930 census show that Yeongnam, with just over 20 percent of the peninsula’s population, remained the largest region, followed by Honam.

Thus, the Gyeongsang provinces’ relative population growth thereafter in a divided Korea, together perhaps with Honam’s relative decline, explains some of Yeongnam’s domination of South Korean presidential politics. Although this is just a fraction of the larger story, it’s worth considering, at least for now, in accounting for the frustrating persistence of this regional imbalance, an imbalance that will not be corrected any time soon.

Kyung Moon Hwang is professor in the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of "A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).