Elections strengthens democracy in South Korea

Richard Halloran The Korea Herald Asia News Network Seoul

As the dust settles after South Korea's legislative elections of April 15, it is clear that the results were not just a landslide that brought a new party to power but an earthquake whose tremors are being felt in the United States and China and, to a lesser extent, in North Korea and Japan.

Moreover, the outcome of the election shows that the democracy for which many South Koreans struggled from 1960 to 1990 has a solid foundation and has even become robust in all its quarrelsome and muddled splendor.

The elections also produced a touch of nostalgia with the defeat of Kim Jong-pil. As a young lieutenant colonel, he played a vital part in the 1961 coup that brought Maj. Gen. Park Chung- hee to power and eventually made him president. Kim, a member of the National Assembly, was the last of the old guard to retire.

At the same time, a symbolic torch has been passed with emergence of President Park's daughter, Park Geun-hye, as a political leader. As a young woman, Park became her father's official hostess after her mother's assassination in 1974; President Park was assassinated in 1979. Today, Park Geun-hye heads the Grand National Party.

The landslide occurred when the new Uri Party vaulted from 47 seats prior to the voting to 152 seats in the 299-member National Assembly, giving it a simple majority of two. The party was formed only in November 2003.

The party supports President Roh Moo-hyun, who was impeached by the former National Assembly for alleged political improprieties but expects to be reinstated by a court. Polls show that 70 percent of the voters were angered by the impeachment, which helps to explain the drop of the Grand National Party to 121 seats from its pre-election 137.

Uri, which means "our," represents a nationalistic younger generation of Koreans, many of whom are anti-American and pro- China. The Dong-a Ilbo, a leading newspaper, found in a survey that 55 percent of the new National Assembly thought their nation "should value China more than the U.S." in foreign policy.

In addition, legislators split over a commitment by President Roh to send 3,600 soldiers to Iraq at the request of the Bush administration. About half asserted that the troop deployment would be a "barometer" of Korean relations with the U.S., while the other half asserted that the decision should be reversed or at least reviewed.

At a conference at the Pacific Forum, a think tank in Hawaii, Korean scholars suggested that the election results would quicken a debate in Seoul over the tilt toward the U.S. or China in South Korea's security posture. Under the conference rules, the speakers cannot be identified.

A Korean scholar framed the issue thus: "The question for South Korea in the beginning of the 21st century is whether it should strive to prolong, strengthen and modernize its maritime alliance with the United States or strive to seek 'strategic accommodation' with its traditional, pre-20th century patron, China."

As for North Korea, the election results indicate that the South will continue to move toward an accommodation with the North, which will put it even more at odds with the Bush administration that has firmly opposed North Korea's plans to acquire nuclear arms.

Antipathy toward Japan is a given in Korean politics, no matter who is in power, although President Roh, early in his term, traveled to Tokyo to urge the two rivals to put the past behind them. Japan ruled Korea from 1910 to 1945.

On democracy: During the oppressive days of Park Chung-hee's regime almost 40 years ago, Korea's foremost constitutional scholar, Yu Chin-o, asserted in a private conversation that democracy was not just a Western political system but a universal order to which Koreans could aspire.

He contended to a skeptical listener that Korea, despite its long history of authoritarian rulers, would fashion its own brand of democracy that would take into account its Confucian values and ways of making decisions. Korean democracy would be home grown, not imported.

In the last decade, Korea has had three peaceful transfers of power from the old guard represented by the military to leaders of what had been opposition parties, first to President Kim Young-sam in 1993, then to President Kim Dae-jung in 1998, and finally to President Roh Moo-hyun in 2003.

If those transfers of power and the tumultuous legislative election of 2004 mean anything, they have proven that Yu Chin-o was right and his skeptical listener was wrong.

The writer, a former New York Times foreign correspondent in Asia and military correspondent in Washington, D.C., writes from Honolulu.