Hope for a New Beginning

A Retrospective Look at the 2002 Presidential Election in Korea

1. What Happened?

Surely, something astonishing occurred which all progressive-oriented Koreans have yearned for more than a half-century since the liberation of their country in 1945. At six o”clock p.m., when the ban on publication of exit polls expired, the three major TV networks, KBS, MBC, and SBS, revealed their own poll results.

I chose MBC first and saw the anchor”s strained face muscles draw upward somewhat deliberately. It was just twenty seconds before six o”clock and as soon as the digital timer pointed to zero, the caption popped up, announcing “Roh Moo-Hyun 48.4%, Lee Hoi-Chang 46.9%. Candidate Roh wins over Candidate Lee by 1.5%!” Astounded and excited, I switched to other channels to see if they showed similar results. There, too, Roh”s victory in exit polls was being affirmed. At about 10:30 p.m., about four hours after the ballot counting started, Roh Moo-Hyun was confirmed as the President-Elect based on official counting results by the National Election Committee. The dream of those Koreans who felt themselves oppressed under the ancien regime in Dae-Han-Min-Kook (大韓民國 Republic of Korea) had come true.

The storm around the 2002 presidential election in South Korea began with the Millennium Democratic Party”s [MDP] presidential primary race in February. This was the first race of its kind in the history of Korean politics. The process started on Jeju Island, but the big story was the unexpected winning of Roh Moo-Hyun, an exceptional figure in Korean politics. He was exceptional in the sense that he tried ceaselessly to win either a National Assembly seat from or mayoral race in his hometown, Busan, but to avail. These efforts ended in failure because his party, the MDP, has its political base in the southwestern province of Cheolla-Do. This region has traditionally been pitted against the southeastern province of Kyongsang-Do in modern Korean political contests. Busan, along with the nearby city of Daegu, has in many previous contests given seemingly unconditional support to rightist, ancien regime oriented parties and candidates.

Roh Moo-Hyun, originally a human rights lawyer for political dissidents in the 1980s, started his political career as an assemblyman with the patronage of Kim Young-Sam, the so-called godfather of politicians from Busan and Kyoungsang-Do, who became President in 1993.. Roh Moo-Hyun”s early career defied the odds by directly challenging the entrenched regionalism which the former dictator Park Chung Hee aroused. Roh operated in the political sphere by doing what other Korean politicians would describe only as political suicide. With the exception of his first term as an assemblyman from Busan, Roh failed to be elected in his hometown three times in succession in the 1990s, although he succeeded in being elected in a by-election for the Jongro District, Seoul. in 1998. In the 2000 National Assembly election, he ran once more in Busan, giving up his electorally safe seat in Seoul. His campaign buckled under the weight of provincialist sentiments advanced by the Grand National Party (GNP).

After his failure in the 2000 election, he was nicknamed “Fool Roh Moo-Hyun” by his sympathizers. But thanks to this regretful turn of even, which seemed to mark the end of Roh”s political life, a new political force came into being. The first politician-based fan club was launched spontaneously on the Internet. This loose club soon developed into a nationwide organization of supporters named Nosamo (literally meaning the Gathering of Persons Who Love Roh Moo-Hyun). Focusing their activities around the group’s homepage, the participants spent their own time and money in supporting Roh’s electoral campaign. They built the first volunteer group of this kind, an unprecedented development in Korean political history. Also, the members of osamo, which numbered 70,000, paid for the cost of campaigning themselves, donating 10-20 thousand won (about 8-15 dollars) per person. Furthermore, they initiated the “Hope Pigs” campaign, in which Roh”s supporters contributed to his campaign by filling plastic piggy banks. After Roh”s victory, it was confirmed that 400 million won still remained and that the money was absorbed into the official budget of the MDP, whose official organs did much damage to Roh’s electoral campaign during its darker periods.

The Official Results of the 2002 Presidential Election of ROK

Candidate Vote Total Percentage

1 Roh Moo-Hyun 12,014,277 48.9%

2 Lee Hoi-Chang 11,443,297 46.6%

Gap 570,980 2.3%

3 Kwon Young-Gil 957,000 3.9%

The electoral roll amounted to 34,991,529; the voters amounted to 24,784,963. (The voting rate was 70.8%)

2. Roh”s Personal Mission: Bringing Korean Democracy Up to Code

According to conventional wisdom, Roh had more factors that would hinder his Presidential bid than those which would support it. As mentioned above, he has always run against social and political trends like provincialism and party cronyism. For the past two decades it has been established wisdom that without a regional connection, it is impossible for anyone to expect to be elected to a high political office. Even with this political problem looming large, Roh was not to be deterred.

Roh was born in Kimhae, near Busan, in 1946. His family’s poor, farming background was conspicuously different from the so-called main stream Korean politicians. The highest formal education Roh completed was Busan Commercial High School, the training ground for lower class bank clerks and similar service jobs. He passed the national bar examination in 1975 by studying law on his own, and served as a judge in Daejeon for eight months in 1977. The net result of this was that Roh could not benefit from the future political connections that Korean education often provides.

The conditions of his marriage to Kwon Yang-Sook were also seen as a political liability. His father-in-law, a member of the Communist-oriented South Korean Labor Party for many years, died under house arrest in 1970s. In the past environment of fervent anti-Communism, even the slightest connection to the leftist element could have been fatal to one”s career.

Roh’s short three-year career as lawyer in Busan gave him some financial breathing room. However, his life course experienced a dramatic turning point in 1981 when he met a group of clients who had been tortured and prosecuted for their participation in the student movement against the military regime of Chun Doo-Hwan. He decided to engage in the social liberalization and political democratization of Korea and got involved in the democratic movement of the Busan region. His political engagement culminated in the June Struggle of 1987, when he led a demonstration of citizens and students on the street and plaza in Busan.

When he sympathized with the striking laborers of Daewoo Shipyard, however, the Attorney General took measures to revoke his license to practice law. The power of the anti-democratic ancien regime was still strong and competent enough to deprive him of his subsistence.

Roh”s personal life was a process of experiencing and then working against the forces that hampered the democratic and liberal urges of Korean society, such as provincialism, money politics, pre-modern authoritarianism in almost all parts of society, antidemocratic and anti-liberal prejudices linked with anti-communism or red complex, and the established privileges of the main stream. Traditionally in Korea, most young people from the lower social strata who confront the dominant power of elites end up compromising with the established mainstream. This may account for the attraction many Koreans feel for the “Fool” Roh Moo-Hyun. Drawn into his camp are many young Koreans, especially those in their 20s and 30s (dubbed the 2030 generation in current political lingo), who yearn for drastic changes.

3. The Path to the Presidency: The Social Dynamics that Made Roh Moo Hyun the Candidate of Hope

By the time of the 2002 election, more and more Koreans were becoming weary of anti-democratic tendencies in the Korean government, even though this statist-oriented paradigm of economic development and modernization brought national wealth and the consequent improvement in living standards for the general populace. At a certain point, the elite structure evolved to allow popular input. However, by this time, most Koreans had been brought up under the political psychology of supporting the dominant current of thought without question. It was the financial crisis of 1997, dubiously called the “IMF Crisis” in Korea, which brought the myth of perpetual growth to an end. Owing to this, which was the sole economic crisis since the Korean War of 1950, the entire facade of Korean political organization was called into question.

The Kim Dae-Jung government and his party did not live up to the high expectations many Koreans had for political reform. Kim certainly accomplished many great things, such as a detente between North and South through the sunshine policy, early redemption of IMF debts, and rapid revival of economic dynamics in foreign trade and information technology. These achievements must have sown the seeds of Roh”s victory in the presidential election. However, President Kim”s often heavy-handed manner, combined with his seeming neglect of the human costs of restructuring, undermined the admiration many Koreans had for him. In addition to the many perceived problems in Kim Dae Jung’s administrative style, many were furious when the corruption scandal involving his two sons emerged (It should be noted that this scandal was incomparably smaller in scope than those of former presidents like Chun Doo-Hwan, Roh Tae-Woo, and the son of Kim Young-Sam). The GNP, representing mainly the knee-jerk reaction to such developments, scored a sweeping victory in the local elections of June 2002.

The main factor which contributed to Roh”s success in the Presidential election was the poor strategic decision of the GNP in placing all its hopes on candidate Lee Hoi-Chang. The GNP overestimated the effects of the June election, in which the voting rate amounted to only 46.4 percent, the lowest ever in a nationwide Korean election. The GNP was sure that the Korean people wanted, first of all, to call the corrupt government of Kim Dae-Jung to account, along with the MDP. The GNP”s main strategy was to relate Roh to the negative image of President Kim. That is, the GNP campaigned not against the actual candidate Roh, but against President Kim. The GNP”s strategy of negative campaigning applied also to Chung Mong-Joon, a new competitor who emerged from the success of the Korea/Japan World Cup. Chung was blasted for his insider stock deals and such negative campaigning pushed him away from the political establishment. Most of opinion polls during the campaign showed that Lee’s approval rating never went over 40 percent.

A more fundamental factor in Roh”s victory was the success of his camp in integrating the new social dynamics of Korean society into massive mobilization for his political support. The aforementioned disadvantageous factors unfavorable to his personal career are connected intimately with the structural peculiarities of the ancien regime of Dae-Han-Min-Kook. Roh”s camp made people become conscious of these factors and succeeded in persuading them to identify themselves with his liberal political convictions.

I am of the opinion that the ancien regime of Dae-Han-Min-Kook, the deep structure of unjust social order in South Korea, was projected and set in practice by Rhee Seung-Man”s Jeong-Eup Declaration of June 1946, itself a reaction to the Allies program for the military occupation of the peninsula following the Second World War. The core idea of the Jeong-Eup Declaration was the formation of a state that would specifically exclude Communist elements. This ideology created the means for the initiation of territorial sectionalism, national division, and the foundation of a separate independent state, which none of the major powers envisioned up to that point.

Anticipating the coming geopolitical challenges associated with the emerging Cold War, Rhee sought the support of pro-Japanese elements left over from the previous order. The viability of such a project has always been based on the political immaturity of the Korean people, which enabled authoritarian rule, dependency on the bureaucrats that managed the national economy, the ideological hegemony of anticommunism over other political ideologies, and not least the conviction that political and military support from the United States would be the dominant political currency of the new world order.

Whether Koreans liked it or not, Rhee”s project formed the basis of the ancien regime of Dae-Han-Min-Kook for a half-century, in which military dictatorship and social power was perpetuated by the state-centered mode of economic growth. The political ideology imprinted by the ruling groups on the ruled in this ancien regime was not only a byproduct of but was designed to perpetuate the division between North and South, rulers and ruled, core and periphery. The ruling groups of the post-war order included extreme-right anti-communist politicians, conglomerate capitalist groups called the chaebol, military forces of politicized generals and officials, and the three largest newspapers, i.e., Chosun Ilbo, Joong Ang Ilbo, and Dong A Ilbo. The social power of these groups survived the process of democratic consolidation which dissolved the system of formal military dictatorship in the June revolt of 1987. Two presidents from the movement of democratization, Kim Young-Sam and Kim Dae-Jung, were elected only after they compromised and associated with ancientist politicians, although it is certain that the political rivalry of the two Kims based on provincialism has hindered the dissolution of the ancien regime.

The solid front shown by the ancien regime did not show signs of cracking until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a generational change shifted political mores dramatically. If the June revolt of 1987 was the first real symptom of democratic change, the 1997 election was the second signal for anticipating the real possibility of dissolving the structures of the ancien regime. Following this same logic, Roh”s victory in the presidential election of 2002 may be taken as the beginning of the end for the ancien regime. Roh Moo-Hyun must have placed himself at the center of this transitional flow with his personal political career in mind. He made no attempts to build connections with the establishment for the purpose of advancing his own political fortunes. Cheong Mong-Joon made a name for himself by bringing the World Cup to Korea. With his candidacy seen as nothing more than a fad by pundits, Cheong decided to yield to Roh”s candidacy aftera public debate between them and a binding public opinion poll. After he failed to elicit Roh”s consent on some political patronage posts, Cheong dissolved the partnership on the eve of the election, a move which was perceived as immature and calculative by the majority of Korean voters, who were by then convinced of Roh’s suitability at any rate.

Such conviction was the strongest among Nosamo members whose action made the difference in the election result. After Cheong dissolved the partnership on the eve of the election, they resorted to using the Internet chat rooms and mobile phones to mobilize their friends, relatives and acquaintances to vote (for Roh)

picture (See the table below of the Comparison of Telecommunicating Population between 1997 and 2002. From left column, this table shows successively the number of ADSL subscribers, Internet users, PC distributions, and mobile phone users. Unit: 10 Thousand).

Three million Internet users visited the portal site www.naver.com on the eve of the election, five to six times more than on a normal day. From 11am to 1pm on the election day, the mobile phone communication amounted to 18 million cases, a record number. Voters in their 20s and 30s called one another, friends and relatives, even from abroad, to bring more people to polling stations to vote. Exit poll results indicated that 70 percent of the younger generation supported Roh. Their ballots, combined with the 40 percent level of support among the middle aged Koreans led to an astonishing result against the ancien regime.

This outcome was the product of a kind of political revolution in Korea. The dream of the progressives who have long supported democratization and national reunification came true. More surprisingly, the traditional anti-communist-oriented provinces of Kangwon and Kyoung-Gi supported Roh as well.

4. What Can we Do? Hope, but Carefully!

But did the future really win over the past? Yes, but only partiallyt. The GNP still maintains a majority in the National Assembly. The large majority of local governments remains under the control of the GNP. The social forces of the ancien regime still retain strong power in comparison to the new social forces which the election revealed. The strength of this bloc is its unanimity in support of the old order. Its weakness, however, is that its ranks are dwindling.

The present political influence of Roh in institutional circles is limited even within his own party. The new social forces which emerged in the 2002 election are still diffuse. The members of Nosamo and of the National Reform Party, which was organized in August 2002, were and are volunteers. They are inexperienced in the realm of real politics and in administration of state organs.

Roh was elected to inject some vitality into the political sphere. Fortunately, the forces concentrated in the presidential election of 2002 in support of Roh were vitalized through moral anger against social injustice, debate on social and national issues, and voluntary political engagement. They used the free space of the Internet as a public forum, airing their views in a space that was beyond the scope of the political establishment. This presence of strategy shows that this movement is not a mere fad, but a political movement in the truest sense. If Roh can mobilize these forces into active political engagement, he may be able to bring political maturity to Korea. My hope for the Roh administration is that it lets everyone, including even those hostile to it, to speak and act before Roh himself speaks and acts.