Political weather vane swings as Koreans vote

Note: This story will be updated as results come in late on Wednesday night, South Korea time.

SEOUL – Nearly 12 million votes were in play in South Korea on Wednesday as two key by-elections – for the mayoral seats in the capital, Seoul, and the country’s second city, Busan – were contested.

In addition to the races in Seoul, in the country’s northwest, and Busan, in the southeast, 17 regional seats are also up for grabs. But the big battleground is the capital: Busan has just under 3 million eligible voters, while in Seoul, that number is 8.4 million.

In this country of 51 million, the central issues in the recent politicking were necessarily domestically – indeed, locally – focused.

Yet they have political ramifications that will be watched far beyond South Korea’s border, for they are the last major plebiscite before the presidential election of March 2022.

The joy of opposition

According to polls, President Moon Jae-in’s liberal Democratic Party of Korea, or DPK, is set to take a drubbing at the hands of the main conservative opposition, the People’s Power Party, or PPP. In Seoul, the PPP had a 20 percentage point lead in the last poll, taken one week before Wednesday’s election.

If that is correct, it would be a disastrous reversal of fortune for the DPK after its parliamentary election triumph in April 2020, when it captured an absolute majority of 180 seats in the 300-seat, unicameral National Assembly.

What a difference a year makes. The odds are now stacked against the DPK. That should provide grist to the right’s mill, but the PPP is also showing off its political weaknesses.

With South Korea now under moderate social distancing guidelines, the campaign has taken its usual form. Vans blaring high-volume campaign songs cruised the streets, while the candidates were shepherded around markets, took public transport and took upbeat – but masked – selfies with voters. 

Pundits were reluctant to call Wednesday’s votes forward indicators ahead of the presidential race, but made clear it reflects public sentiment.

“The presidential election is about a year away, and a year is a lifetime in politics,” said James Kim, a scholar who follows public opinion at think tank the Asan Institute, noting that the outcome of Seoul mayoral elections has generally not proven to be a leading indicator of presidential races.

“But it is a referendum on the ruling party,” Kim added. ‘So, in many ways, it’s a good test to see where the two major parties are as they head into the presidential election.”

Moon’s light dims

Multiple dynamics are apparent.

Although the DPK’s candidate for mayor of Seoul is female – Park Young-sun, former minister of SMEs and Startups, which has helped generate an excellent venture ecosystem nationwide – the ruling party is disadvantaged in the by-elections: Both high-profile mayoral seats were vacated after sex abuse scandals involving male DPK incumbents.

Moreover, the key political talking point in Seoul coffee shops and chat rooms is perceived government failures in real estate policies. These are widely assessed to have resulted in higher taxes for landlords – but also higher prices for tenants.

Seoul house prices have soared so stratospherically under the current administration that even the greatest possible good fortune would still fall short for prospective home buyers: “Lotto jackpot no longer enough not buy Seoul apartment” thundered the country’s leading right-wing newspaper, the Chosun Ilbo, on April 6.

Adding further fuel to this fire is a property speculation scandal that engulfed the national housing development corporation a month ago.

More broadly, the DPK is the party President Moon hails from.

Under South Korea’s electoral system, presidents are permitted only one five-year term and local political patience is notoriously short. In this unforgiving environment, the incumbent president customarily becomes a “lame duck” late in his or her term, as the bureaucracy, with an eye on opinion polls, becomes lethargic in promoting policy passed down by ministers.

Moon, to his credit, has largely avoided this thus far, partly due to his government’s impressive performance in containing Covid-19 without lockdowns. That enabled the country to deliver the best GDP growth in the OECD in 2020.

And unlike his despised predecessor Park Geun-hye, there has been no lethal disaster on Moon’s watch. Park was demonized after the deadly sinking of the ferry Sewol in 2014, but Moon has made public health and safety, notably around the pandemic, a core priority.

Moreover Moon, unlike Park who is now serving a compound 33-year prison sentence for corruption and abuse of power, appears to have swerved any personal scandals. 

However, he is suffering his lowest poll numbers ever and has suffered by association with the real estate problems and the country’s slow vaccination drive. Less than 2% of the population have been inoculated, to date.

This is all grist to the opposition mill. Yet the PPP, too, has an Achilles Heel.

The best candidate it could field was Oh Se-hoon. Oh is a former mayor of Seoul who, in a bizarre incident, quit City Hall after losing a referendum on free school lunches – which he opposed – in 2011.

However, Oh’s position in the Seoul election was massively strengthened in a move that pollsters say is fatal to Park’s chances. Wannabe third-force politician and repeated also-ran Ahn Cheol-soo dropped out of the race to avoid splitting the opposition vote.

While Park has pushed modest plans for public-friendly redevelopment and reconstruction, Oh has returned to a flagship plan dating back to his previous mayorship: the construction of a major international business district in central Seoul’s Yongsan area.

Frustrations, vacuums, alternatives

Voters who spoke to Asia Times seemed more anti-ruling party than pro-opposition.

“It’s not that I like No 2 [Oh], it’s that I think No 1’s [Park’s] party is not doing well,” said a Seoul university student, with reference to the candidates’ numbers on the ballot papers.

Her sentiments were echoed by a 50-something restaurant owner and operator who served Asia Times’ Seoul correspondent lunch on Wednesday.

“The DPK promise everything and deliver nothing,” he said. “We feel betrayed.”

These kinds of sentiment may point toward sunny uplands for the PPP next March. But the right-wing is bereft of any obvious candidate with the necessary blend of experience and charisma to make a realistic run in the presidential race next year.

This is a “huge vacuum,” said Asan Institute’s Kim, though he said he was encouraged by Ahn’s agreement to duck out of the race to upgrade Oh’s chances.

“These kinds of moves are encouraging,” he said. “We are seeing some degree of coalition formation in the conservative opposition, that incorporates moderates.”

Clearly, there is dissatisfaction with mainstream politicians.

Though South Koreans fought for and won full democracy as recently as the 1980s, younger voters voiced the kind of weariness with party politics that is common among longer-established democracies.

“I think everyone knows why this is happening,” a female college student who lives outside Seoul said – a reference to the sex-abuse scandals that rocked city halls in both Busan and Seoul and led to the by-elections.

She indicated that younger voters of her acquaintance may ignore Park and Oh and tick boxes further down the ballot.

“Those of us in our 20s were expecting solutions to this, but we are hearing nothing from either main party – it’s frustrating,” she said. “I think this is why candidates 3-12 are going to get votes.”

Beyond the bilateral DPK-PPP battle at the top of the ballot papers, there were 10 further candidates for Seoul mayor from small or independent bases.

The colorful Huh Kyung-young of the National Revolutionary Party, an early supporter of universal basic income, promised 70% tax rebates and would supply water to Seoul from more distant, non-polluted sources.

Lee Soo-bong of the People’s Welfare Party vowed payments to the self-employed and creating 100,000 jobs for youth by 2025.

And another independent, Oh Tae-yang, ran on an LGBTQ platform.