South Korea: Elections Amid a Pandemic

South Korea’s forthcoming parliamentary elections, scheduled to be held on April 15, 2020, are being defined not only by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, but also by how the electorate perceives the effectiveness of the government’s actions during the crisis.

These are also South Korea’s first legislative elections after the presidential impeachment of 2017, when influence-peddling scandals and the mass popular protests that followed led to the ousting of then-President Park Geun-hye. As such, the electorate is now presented with an opportunity to signal support (or a lack thereof) to the administration of President Moon Jae-in, in power since May 2017. While Korean politics are notoriously mercurial, the results should offer an indication of which political grouping is better placed in the long run-up to the 2022 presidential elections. The two camps are led, respectively, by the ruling Democratic Party, whose main goal is to “complete the candlelight vigils’ reforms,” and the conservative coalition, centered around the United Future Party, which is critical of the Moon administration’s handling of relations with the United States and Japan, its dealings with North Korea, and its economic policies.

Foreign policy is a marginal concern for voters at present. After almost a year of growing tensions with Japan over historical disputes and the “comfort women” issue, which triggered a trade war and placed intelligence cooperation and the U.S.-ROK-Japan trilateral in jeopardy, the matter has been sidelined by the coronavirus pandemic. Similarly, North Korea hardly features in the campaigns, perhaps not a negative issue for the current administration, which invested significant political capital in engaging Pyongyang from early 2018 onward but with limited, if any, success. U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts to get Seoul to increase its financial contribution to the ROK-U.S. alliance have also been muted of late.

Domestically, the Moon administration and the Democratic Party have been mired in a political crisis over the “Cho Kuk scandal” since last year. When former Senior Secretary to the President for Civil Affairs Cho Kuk was appointed as minister of justice in September, a scandal erupted over his daughter’s university admission to Korea University and Busan National University’s Medical School. Given that former President Park’s impeachment came as a result of influence-peddling scandals related to her close confidant’s daughter’s illegal and nontransparent college admission procedure to enter Ewha Womans University, Cho Kuk’s appointment and family scandals caused similar public uproar and tarnished the government’s image.

Three issues are going to play a role in the upcoming elections. First, parliament passed new electoral laws in December 2019. Among other changes, a semi-mixed-member proportional system was introduced. A second bill lowered the legal voting age from 19 to 18 years old. Second, while electoral reform is intended to fix existing problems resulting from the first-past-the-post system for the candidates in the electoral districts and proportional representative system for the party lists, the main parties swiftly began setting up satellite parties for the allocation of seats according to the new system. Last but not least, the electoral campaign and the elections are now overshadowed by the pandemic crisis. Public perceptions of the government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis will crucially shape the election outcome. 

The two main parties contesting the elections are the progressive Democratic Party, led by Lee Hae-chan, and the conservative United Future Party, headed by Hwang Kyo-ahn. Also running are the People Party, led by Ahn Chol-soo; the leftist-nationalist Mingjung Party; the Party for People’s Livelihood, led by Yu Sung-yup, established after the merger of the Bareunmirae Party, the New Alternatives Party, and the Party for Democracy and Peace; and the Justice Party led by Sim Sang-jung. Political factions loyal to former President Park Geun-hye have long been a thorn in the side of the conservative party, and are contesting the elections under the banners of the Our Republican Party and the Pro-Park New Party. In addition, new smaller satellite parties, the Party for the Citizens and the Future Korea Party, have been established to support the Democratic Party and the United Future Party, respectively.

Old and New Cleavages in Korean Society

Since democratization, regionalism has been one of the most enduring political cleavages in South Korea. The southeastern Yeongnam region, a beneficiary of the erstwhile authoritarian government’s development strategy, has traditionally supported conservative parties. Progressives have been stronger in the southwestern Honam region, a more agricultural area neglected during authoritarian times. The city of Gwangju, site of a horrific massacre in 1980 in which hundreds of civilians died and many more were injured, is located there. Besides historical legacies, the regional divide has overlapped with ideological and policy preferences, for example over attitudes toward the United States and North Korean. This is due to the authoritarian legacy, where labor unions were banned and opponents were considered as communists, if not spies collaborating with North Korea, and were oppressed by the authoritarian governments. 

New divisions have also emerged in Korean society and politics, such as generational and gender cleavages. Older voters, driven by nostalgia for authoritarian-era economic development and the war experience, tend to support conservative parties and are in favor of a strong U.S.-ROK-Japan alliance. Voters in their 40s and 50s are likely to be more progressive-leaning as a result of direct experience in the democratization movement. Interest in politics among younger voters, especially those in their 20s, has been very low and their political support for parties appears to be equally divided between the two major parties. 

Within this context, three key developments will define the elections’ outcome.

Electoral Reform

First, the election will test South Korea’s new electoral reforms. Throughout the democratization period, progressives emerged from civil society organizations as well as labor unions, whereas the conservative party combined the legacy of the old ruling party prior to democratization with successors to the supporters of former President Kim Young-sam (1993 -1998), who defected from the pro-democracy opposition coalition with former President Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003). Since then, South Korea has been formally home to a multiparty system, with parties often changing their official names. At the same time, fission and fusions of different political organizations, splinter groups, and factions cannot mask the simpler reality of a de facto dual-party system featuring progressives and conservative parties, with a much smaller labor party on the left.

Such a system is traditionally well regarded for having a positive impact on a country’s governability. Recent research, however, has also shown that multiparty systems with five to eight political parties can be equally stable, with governability not negatively affected by the politics of coalition, negotiation, and compromise among the various parties. Even past Korean administrations have sought to overcome the dominance of two parties with strong regional support to enhance a diverse representation of society, seeking to include women (Korean politics remains very much a male-dominated affair), young social activists, migrant workers and their descendants, LBGT groups, and even defectors from the North.

In December 2019 the parliament passed new electoral laws. One lowered the legal voting age from 19 to 18 years old, which is the age at which the majority of Koreans would graduate high school and enter university. The main reform, however, revolved around the introduction of a new, hybrid mixed-member proportional system (MMP). According to the previous electoral system, which was also a mixed proportional representation system, voters had two votes, one for a candidate directly elected through a first-past-the-post system (253 seats) and one vote for closed party lists (47 seats, allocated through proportional representation). According to the new law, the number of seats allocated according to the two systems remains unchanged. The vote for the district-level candidate also stays. What is different is that the new law replaced the parallel system for the allocation of the 47 party list seats to a mostly compensatory one, designed to be more favorable toward smaller parties that, despite receiving more voters, used to end up with fewer seats due to the first-past-the-post system for the directly elected candidates. Of the 47 party list seats, 17 will still be allocated through proportional representation, whereas 30 seats will be distributed through a compensatory system designed to ensure representation in parliament to parties that failed to gain seats despite receiving votes in the single member districts. Simply put, this will result in the parties performing strongly in the single-seat constituencies losing seats in the MMP portion of seats allocation.

The law is intended to solve a number of well-known problems in Korean politics, including the concentration of power around the two dominant parties and the lack of diversity among parliamentarians. The reform would allow younger, minority political groups to enter parliament. Furthermore, the law would lower the number of “wasted votes” to parties that receive a significant number of votes but still not in sufficient numbers to elect members of parliament.

The ruling party’s proposal faced furious criticism both from outside – the largest opposition party refused to support it, fearing it would lead to a smaller presence in parliament – and from within its ranks, due to the convoluted calculation of seat allocations over what is overall a small number of seats affected by the reform. In the end, despite strong opposition from conservative groups (which did not attend the vote in parliament), a coalition of the Democratic Party, the Bareunmirae Party, the Party for Democracy and Peace, the Justice Party, and the Alternative New Party secured the necessary votes to pass the reform in the National Assembly. After eight months of political battles and a three-day filibuster by the main conservative opposition party, the law – which looks very different from the original draft that would have introduced a 75 percent proportional representation system – was fast-tracked and passed in parliament on December 27, 2019.

Plus ça Change? Electoral Reform and the Emergence of Satellite Parties

The second issue revolves around how the electorate will view the reform itself. Will this change anything substantially? Will this be perceived as a cosmetic change to ensure that despite changing the law everything stays the same in Korean politics? 

Although the law is intended to reform the current system of two dominant parties, the main parties took immediate steps to consolidate their positions under the new rules. The opposition party announced that it would set up a “satellite” party to cushion the impact of the electoral reform and thus retain seats for the proportional representation part. The Liberty Korea Party built a grand coalition with other small conservative factions and parties and founded a conservative opposition coalition party, the United Future Party, and subsequently created the Future Korea Party in February 2020 to compete as a formally standalone party and gain seats. Five members of the United Future Party moved their party affiliation to the new satellite party in order to receive electoral subsidies from the National Election Commission. This sparked protests from the ruling Democratic Party and the Justice Party, which criticized the conservative party’s electoral strategy as illegal and unconstitutional. However, out of a similar concern (losing seats as a result of its own law, and thus precipitating the Moon administration into the lame-duck period) the Democratic Party also allowed the founding of its own satellite party, the Party for the Citizens, on March 15.

Although electoral reform had been one of Moon Jae-in and the Democratic Party’s goals, the way this came about, with the possibility of satellite parties in practice propping up the main parties, weakened the popularity of the reform and undermined the position of the administration. Amid widespread criticism from the public, the Democratic Party and the United Future Party sought to include candidates with disabilities, North Korean defectors, and descendants of activists in the independence movement during the Japanese colonial period to boost their credibility as more diverse political formations.

The Coronavirus Elections

The third dynamic may well prove to be the most consequential for the outcome of the elections. The two main political parties both tried to set the agenda for the electoral campaign. For the ruling Democratic Party, the priority lies in delivering income-led economic growth to a larger strata of the population, thus tackling – at least partly – the deep socioeconomic inequalities that characterize Korean society. As for the conservatives, the main issue is to politically indict the Moon administration for the alleged failure of its North Korean policy and the tensions with the United States and Japan. In reality, however, the April elections have turned into the coronavirus elections.

Globally, the South Korean government has attracted praise for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially due to its ability, so far, to keep the number of deaths to fairly low levels.

The opposition, however, has been highly critical over the government’s slow reaction and reluctance to block travellers coming or returning from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak started. Public opinion also showed high dissatisfaction toward the government’s initial reaction. The concentration of cases around the cities of Daegu and Kyeongbuk, primarily owing to infections among the followers of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, did cause an uproar. 

But the coronavirus crisis rapidly turned into a global pandemic. Seemingly struggling to cope with the surge in cases, spread of infection, and rise in deaths, a number of countries, especially in the West, have begun looking at South Korea as a positive example. The South Korean authorities were able, through widespread testing, contact-tracing, and close surveillance – aided by the use of mobile apps – to limit the impact of the disease, while also retaining a semblance of normality for society and the economy, as South Korea has thus far avoided the lockdowns enacted in an ever larger number of countries.

To help cushion the economic impact of the crisis, on March 13 the local government in Jeonju city introduced a disaster-relief basic income to vulnerable residents who are unemployed or irregular workers. In practice, this meant providing 527,158 Korean won ($415) to about 50,000 people. The mayor of Daegu, one of the most affected areas, the mayor in Seoul, and the governor of Gyeonggi also advocated introducing a similar form of basic income. The central government has allocated more resources to small shop owners while the opposition parties initially criticized such demands and gestures as electoral populism, accusing the authorities of wasting state funds to buy people’s vote.

As election day draws near, politics in South Korea remains as fractious and raucous as always, even at a time of global pandemic crisis.