IT WOULDN’T BE a South Korean election without a bit of spectacle. This year’s campaign, for parliamentary elections on April 10th, featured one legislator expressing penance by shaving his head and riding around in a wooden cage, another proving his “authenticity” by posing shirtless, and still more engaging in pre-recorded rap battles about policy during the vote. But the campaign’s main meme was opposition candidates waving pa (spring onions) to mock Yoon Suk Yeol, the conservative president, for his supposedly unrealistic ideas about how much the everyday fixture of Korean cooking should cost. The jibe became so popular that South Korea’s election commission banned voters from bringing the allium to polling stations.
The perception that Mr Yoon was out of touch cost his People Power Party (PPP) dearly. The former chief prosecutor was voted in two years ago, promising to end the “imperial” presidency and be closer to ordinary folk. Two years previously, the Democratic Party (DP) and its sister party had won parliamentary elections with 180 seats, the largest tally in South Korea’s democratic history. This time, with the highest turnout for a parliamentary election in over three decades, the DP bloc did not get quite as many seats. But it still gave the PPP a thrashing, winning 175 seats of the parliament’s 300 seats compared with 108 for the president’s party and its satellite. A third party, the Rebuilding Korea Party (RKP), won 12 seats. If the RKP can work with the DP, the two parties would hold over three-fifths of the parliament’s seats, giving them the power to fast-track bills. A number of high-ranking officials, including Han Dong-hoon, the PPP’s interim leader, resigned apologetically after the news came in. A cynic would think that they were deserting a sinking ship. Mr Yoon’s ability to build a domestic legacy is in serious jeopardy.
Mr Yoon’s unfavourability rating has hovered in the low 30s for most of his time in office. His party’s election prospects were not helped by accusations of corruption against his first lady or his government’s inability to resolve a dispute with doctors who have been striking since February. But ultimately it was pocketbook issues like inflation and housing prices thattopped voters’ concerns. “Prices are too high, the economy is bad as ever,” complained Mr Cho, a 33-year old voting in Seoul’s well-heeled Gangnam area. “But the president isn’t interested in knowing the price of a spring onion.”
The DP’s majority means that Mr Yoon will not be able to pass any meaningful reforms unless he can reach across the aisle. That seems unlikely. Despite claiming he wants to radically reform the country, the president has put forward little significant legislation and passed even less. He has, however, vetoed nine bills in his two years in office, more than any previous president had in a full five-year term.
Having retained its majority, the DP are unlikely to be in a mood to compromise. Lee Jae-myung, the party’s leader, has long railed against the administration as a “prosecutor dictatorship”, staffed by former colleagues of the president. And the RPK’s leader, Cho Kuk, said before the election that he hoped to make the president “a lame duck first, and then a dead duck”.
The PPP has hardly wooed its opponents. Mr Han spent the campaign implying the leaders of both the DP and RKP were criminals. Mr Lee is under indictment for graft, though he denies the charges and says he is the victim of a political witch-hunt. Mr Cho, meanwhile, is appealing against a conviction for forging documents and bribery—although that probably doesn’t warrant comments made by Mr Han comparing him to Hitler.
Perversely, Mr Yoon may be glad to have an unco-operative opposition as an excuse for domestic policy failure. Two years in, his team struggles to articulate a detailed or sufficiently ambitious plan for resolving the country’s problems. These include a younger generation unable to find decent jobs or afford a house, a rapidly ageing population and the world’s lowest fertility rate,just 0.72. Its economy is also dependent on exports and is overly beholden to a small number of conglomerates, meaning it is struggling to cope with America and China’s reshaping of world trade. At least now Mr Yoon has someone to blame for not getting anything done on the home front.
The president will probably concentrate on areas in which he has already had some success, such as strengthening South Korea’s alliance with America and trying to improve the country’s troubled relationship with Japan. Yet Mr Lee, instinctively anti-Japanese and keen to see South Korea adopt a more balanced approach to the Sino-American rivalry, may try to upset that agenda. Even where he is strongest, Mr Yoon may find legacy-building a challenge.■
Editor’s Note (April 12th2024):This article has been amended to clarify why opposition candidates chose spring onions as a symbol of protest.
