Kwon again? [Korean elections special 4]
15/9 UPDATE:
Kwon won the nomination for the DLP today, so no great surprise there, although it was quite close (perhaps closer than people expected?) with Shim getting 47.26 % of the vote.
Article on the DLP website (in Korean).
Lost among all the kerfuffle surrounding the selection of Lee Myung-bak as the GNP candidate for the upcoming presidential elections; the disintegration-reintegration, ‘let’s make up a new party on the spot’ drama being played out in the ‘liberal camp’; and now the uninspiring mess of the UNDP primaries, the primary elections for the Democratic Labour Party have been going on this week (as Andy has already pointed out elsewhere).
When I was in Korea last month I managed to see all three of the DLP prospective candidates (Kwon Young-ghil, No Hoech’an and Shim Sang-jeong) speak at an antiwar rally and I was impressed with them generally. In the first round earlier this week no candidate managed to get more than 50 percent, although Kwon Young-ghil was well ahead of the other two, and No Hoech’an in third place was eliminated. The second round of voting, between Kwon and Shim is now underway and scheduled to finish tomorrow. It looks pretty certain that Kwon will win and become the party’s presidential candidate for what I think is the third time. Quite a few people think that this would be something of a shame and it would be a good time to have a new face heading the DLP’s challenge. Especially since this is an election where popular opposition to the Korea-US FTA and the general disarray of the liberal forces that have run the government for the last few years means that the party has a chance of getting a decent share of the vote and setting itself up well for next year’s parliamentary elections. On the other hand, Kwon is probably the only widely recognised figure in the DLP and he also has a sterling record in the Korean labour movement.
Apparently (as this article in Korean explains) Kwon has the support of the most powerful faction of the party, the ‘Chamint’ong’ (basically left nationalists descended from the NL tradition - their name stands for ‘Independence-Democracy-Unification’) while Shim is being backed by the ‘Central’ faction of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions which is another powerful force within the DLP. However, the Chamint’ong are the strongest faction in the party, holding most of the top positions, including party chair, after last year’s elections.
Whoever wins the election tomorrow, it seems that earlier hopes of some sort of pan-left-liberal candidate are fading, although it would be interesting to know where some of those people on the left wing of the former Uri Party (like Im Jong-in) are going now, since the new post-Uri United New Democratic Party (catchy name!) seems to be firmly on the right of the liberal spectrum. In any case, at the risk of repeating myself, it seems that the DLP has a chance to do well in the coming presidential election, since all the mainstream candidates look likely to be pro-neoliberal and pro-war/US, offering voters a choice only in style of rhetoric, choice of cronies and favoured type of corruption.
