South Korean Politics and Elections

Power Struggle Deepens in Governing Uri Party

Roh Loyalists Seek to Oust Party Leadership

Korea Times, December 5, 2006

By Ryu Jin
Staff Reporter

A feud in the governing Uri Party intensified into an ``all-out war'' between President Roh Moo-hyun's loyalists and the incumbent party leaders Tuesday.

The Pro-Roh faction, comprising some 270 party members, demanded that the party's Emergency Committee, led by Chairman Kim Geun-tae, be dissolved and that it hand its power over to the party's Central Committee.

Of 139 lawmakers of the party, about 20 legislators support Roh, according to party insiders. The remaining 120-odd lawmakers belong to anti-Roh groups.

But party leaders and a number of lawmakers who have pursued the creation of a new political party ahead of the 2007 presidential race stuck to their position that they would conduct an opinion survey to decide the party's future plan.

In South Korea, All Politics Is National

Campaigns & Elections, August 2006

(SKPE note:  This is my final draft and of the an article I wrote for C&E last summer and does not reflect some changes that editors made.)

Some 20 years ago, elections in South Korea were generally decided by large-scale fraud and intimidation, which ensured the sitting president kept his position and had the services of a rubber-stamp legislature. Gradually the laws changed, and candidates today face severe restrictions on campaign spending, a very short campaign season, and limits on advertising. Those rules have made politics in this emerging democracy an often high-turnover affair and have allowed for the relatively rapid rise of generation of newcomers who cut their political teeth as college students during the democracy movement of the 1980s.

That dynamism was on full display in local elections on May 31 in which the conservative Grand National Party (GNP) swept six of seven mayoral races in major cities representing 23 million of South Korea’s 48 million people. They also won six of nine provincial races and took approximately 160 of 230 seats up for grabs county governors, major city borough chiefs and smaller city mayors. To cap their victory, the GNP also took the bulk of 3,621 local council seats, ensuring a strong ‘farm club’ for future elections.