This year, the country will vote for its next president. The hopefuls are already busily scurrying about. The ruling and opposition parties all had New Year’s Day celebrations, at which they rallied for victory in the election scheduled for December 19, 2007.
Presidential elections should be more than simple processes through which we choose a head of state and caretaker of the executive branch. They should also be the point of departure and part of the process through which our society works to solve the problems it faces. It is essential that there be intense debate about how to run the country, and imperative that there be popular discussion about where the country should be going. Only when that happens will the country’s democracy move forward and the country’s popular energy be unified.
Roughly 11 months ahead of the election, however, the mood is a far cry from what it should be. There is more interest in candidates’ popularity - based on how people feel about them relative to other candidates - instead of in seeing them engage in productive discussion and policy debate. That surely has to be a reaction stemming from the disappointment and feeling of helplessness toward the current ruling camp, but it is not a positive thing to have such huge gaps in popularity when individual candidates have yet to be put to thorough scrutiny. We need to guard against that because it could easily lead to just another round of disappointment and frustration.
Instead of alternating between extremes of joy or sorrow at their approval ratings, candidates need to agonize over what their policies are going to be on sustaining inter-Korean rapprochement while resolving the North Korean nuclear issue and on how to alleviate socioeconomic disparity while cultivating the country’s growth potential. They need to work on being ready to tell us what their own ideas are on real estate and education. This is not the time for them to be spending all their time on managing their popularity levels by giving guest lectures at universities, making tours of given provincial regions, and making appearances overseas.
It is for this reason that the Grand National Party in particular needs to stop thinking it will win the election if it can make sure the three people who want to be its candidate, Lee Myung-bak, Park Geun-hye, and Sohn Hak-kyu, are each ready to submit to the party’s internal candidate selection process and to support whomever wins. Far more important than its selection process is a vision for how to run the country, and concrete policies to make it happen. The party will be hit with criticism for being stuck in the same dated thinking if it jumps on the bandwagon of disappointment in the current government, and approaches the whole campaign with ideological slogans about how it is going to "end the leftist regime." It needs to show the country how it has changed as a party, because if it doesn’t show this in a very tangible way, it could find its popularity vanishing into thin air.
You also wonder whether the current talk between the Uri and Democratic parties about supposedly "rearranging the political landscape of the ruling camp" is helpful for the development of Korean democracy, either. The fact that no one from within or even somewhat associated with the ruling party is given the time of day by the country’s voters speaks of how weak Korea’s party democracy currently is, but rearranging the political fault lines just ahead of a presidential election is far more likely to hurt the culture of political party democracy than strengthen it. The dissolving and merging of parties cannot be merely a strategy to change the sign hanging outside in order to win another election. The parties should instead remember that any such realignment must contribute to the country’s political development.
Ultimately, it is up to voters to assure that the presidential election is not a free-for-all for political movers and shakers, and that it instead melts away discord in our society and thereby brings further development to our democracy. That means voters are going to have to stay alert to their responsibility all year long.
[Editorial] Voters must keep parties in check |
