After losing an election in which conditions were deemed advantageous for the liberal opposition, the entire progressive camp is now mired in deep silence and confusion.
No doubt candidate Moon Jae-in and his Democratic United Party should take most of the blame for the dismal showing.
In short, the main opposition parties lost in terms of both strategy and tactics. Moon was short, by at least ``2 percent” as he confessed, of convincing voters why he should be the next leader with clearly differentiated policies by watching his conservative rival, Park Geun-hye, preempt the liberal agenda.
The DUP was also rather slow to catch the changing sentiment among the electorate, relying just on independent candidate, Ahn Cheol-soo, and his young supporters. It’s a pity the main opposition party seemed to have learned nothing from its humiliating setback in April’s parliamentary polls, as seen by its failure to change both its core platforms and personnel.
However, a deeper look into Korea’s current political trend shows a more fundamental change than this analysis by Monday morning quarterbacks. Although eclipsed by the presidential poll, the liberal camp also suffered crushing defeats in two by-elections: one was to replace the governorship of South Gyeongsang Province, Moon’s bastion of political support, and the other was to pick the top educational administrator for the nation’s capital.
What all this shows is Korea’s conservative-led political landscape has moved even further to the right recently. Nothing backs this up better than the nation’s demographic change, in which people in their 50s and 60s outnumbered 20- and 30-somethings. In most countries, the older generation vote for conservatives, while younger people vote liberal, which means the latest election outcome will not be a one-off event but a lasting phenomenon.
Moreover, those in their early 50s now were the so-called ``386 generation” ― who were born in the 1960s, attended colleges in the ‘80s and were in their 30s during Korea’s democratization. This means the nation’s two major confrontational political forces each representing democratization and industrialization are fused in the 50-something bracket. And the biggest interest of these baby boomers is economic stability after retirement. Behind their highest turnout and one-sided support for Park were concerns about falling prices of their sole asset ― their homes.
So the progressives need to think twice about whether they should continue to be gripped by decades-old slogans that pit democracy against dictatorship and the historical dispute over pro-Japanese collaborators. The younger generation, who regard democracy as natural as the air they breathe, do not care about this much, while the older ones are more preoccupied with post-retirement life. Little wonder Moon’s vows to rectify democracy setbacks were engulfed by Park’s promises to lift 70 percent of the population back to the middle class.
This is never to say democratic, people-oriented governments are no longer important in this nascent democracy. Park and her ruling Saenuri Party have shown serious deficiencies regarding such concepts as basic rights and the proper rule of law. The opposition party should closely watch and continue to raise problems if the incoming administration follows the footsteps of the outgoing as far as these most important and fundamental values of democracy are concerned.
But the liberal opposition can ill afford to wait only for the conservatives’ reneging on various political and economic issues they made during campaigns.
Aside from making reforms in both personnel and organization, as well as developing new policies, it’s time for the political progressives to set up think tanks to research their new ideological standpoints, as the U.S. Democrats did after their consecutive setbacks between 2000 and 2008.
It remains to be seen whether Park and her administration will keep campaign promises or go back to their conservative bases. In any case, however, political progressives will have little future unless they are reborn from radical, negative and ideological groups to more moderate, positive and reality-based forces that take the political center but still care about the underprivileged 30 percent even in a Park-ruled Korea.