While the entire nation was taking a Lunar New Year break, the Grand National Party (GNP) was as busy as ever. The Seoul headquarters of the soon-to-be ruling party was buzzing with aspiring lawmakers wanting to run on the GNP ticket and party officials screening their applications. With parliamentary polls less than two months away, some election experts say the GNP candidates could win in up to two thirds of precincts. This means the birth of an unprecedented political behemoth.
If the GNP gets more than 200 seats out of the 299-member unicameral National Assembly, the party will be able to change the Constitution by itself for the first time in the nation's political history. The opposition parties, on the other hand, could neither enact nor revise laws without the assent of the ruling party. The conservative GNP swept local elections in 2006 and grabbed the presidency in 2007. Most political pundits believe it will also dominate parliamentary power in 2008.
All this raises a suspicion that Korea might follow its former colonizer in politics, too. Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has governed the country since 1955 except during a brief Socialist-led coalition in the mid-1990s, resulting in the coinage of the ``55 regime'' or ``one-and-a-half-party system,'' meaning all the opposition seats account for just half of the ruling party's. One cannot completely rule out the possibility of the ``08 regime'' being launched in Korea. How will voters handle it on April 9?
Whether Japan's one-party rule suits the world's No. 2 economic power is up to the Japanese themselves. Likewise, it is up to the Koreans whether they need a political system that has the most basic function of checks and balances. The problem is many voters here are finding little alternative to the right-of-center party, either because of the global neo-liberalistic trend or because of the incumbent administration's political and economic failures. Still the ruling camp's rebirth appears harder than ever.
If the GNP crumbles at all, it will be not from without but from within, such as due to arrogance and self-righteousness, resulting in complacency and corruption. And that is exactly why it had to hand over power to the leftist camp a decade ago and is now snatching it back from the latter. Some say that this is the process of a democracy maturing, but lessons appear meager for the price. How long should Koreans be content with the least bad party?
Some foreigners ― and Koreans ― praise this country for achieving both democracy and economic growth in just half a century. They may be right if only they meant procedural democracy and a statistical economy. If Korea rectified the problems of get-rich-quick capitalism through the Asian financial crisis, the nation should also do so in politics by renovating political parties, which are little more than temporary assemblies of both sitting and would-be lawmakers. Voters could start by judging persons, not their parties.