South Korean voters set to make left turn
Vancouver Sun, Canada
Manthorpe: South Korean voters set to make left turn
By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun
8 April 2012
A coalition of left of centre parties is well positioned to win South Korea’s parliamentary elections on Wednesday with a platform of improving social services and renegotiating a free-trade pact with the United States.
And a victory in the National Assembly elections by the opposition Democratic Unity Party (DUP) would likely foreshadow a defeat by the scandal-plagued conservative administration in presidential elections in December.
A win by the DUP coupled with the party’s candidate winning the presidency in December could further stall Canada’s already stalled free trade talks with South Korea.
The DUP has capitalized on public disquiet about the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement that came into force last month.
Opponents of the FTA say the deal will hurt domestic agriculture and investment, sentiments that have been fed by the American International Trade Commission estimates that U.S. exports to South Korea will expand by almost $11 billion in the first year of pact’s operation.
Among young and left-leaning voters there are also strong objections to what is seen as the current administration’s favouring of big business, especially the large “Chaebol” industrial conglomerates.
Recent local elections have shown strong support among voters for the redistribution of wealth through such things as improved welfare payments, free school lunches and subsidized university fees.
President Lee Myung Bak and his Grand National Party, South Korea’s dominant political force during the decades of authoritarian rule until the transition to democracy in the late 1980s, have tried everything to slough off the image of failure that has clung to him since he took office in 2008.
But even changing the party’s name to Saenuri, or the New Frontier Party (NFP), has not so far staunched the steady drip, drip of scandals that have dogged the Lee administration from the start.
That sorry catalogue got a new entry last week when the national prosecutors office announced it is investigating allegations the government illegally tapped the telephones and otherwise spied on up to 2,600 people in politics, the media and labour movements.
The scandal came to light when a former officer in the prime minister’s office gave a USB memory stick containing images of more than 20,000 pages of documents to the Korean Broadcasting System.
Government politicians have attempted to dilute the scandal by pointing out that some of the documents refer to surveillance that took place before Lee and his party came to power.
Lee, who managed South Korea’s largest construction company before entering politics, came to office amid allegations of involvements in a scam by an investment house.
The whiff of ethical corner-cutting has dogged him and his associates ever since.
Most recently the Speaker of the National Assembly resigned over allegations of vote buying in February. And in December the chairman of Lee’s party quit after an official was identified by police as being involved in a cyber attack on the country’s election commission. Recent polls show support for Lee’s administration is 27 per cent, half what it was when he came to office.
All this might be forgiven if Lee and the NFP had deliver ed on his promise to raise per capita income to $40,000 and maintain an annual economic growth rate of seven per cent.
But Asia’s fourth largest economy has managed an average annual growth rate of only 3.2 per cent during Lee’s term in office, down from 4.3 per cent during the troubled tenure of his predecessor Roh Moo Hyun.
Inflation is also up at about 3.5 per cent and unemployment was at 4.2 per cent in February.
However, unemployment among young people in the 15 to 29 age range is double the national average at 8.3 per cent.
It is these young voters who are expected to throw their support behind the opposition DUP, which has pledged to create 3.3 million new jobs.
Latest polls show support for the NFP at about 30 per cent with the DUP just behind, but within the margin of error at 28 per cent.
But political strategists in South Korea say 30 per cent support for the NFP represents the rock-bottom following among hard line conservative voters.
It is not enough for the NFP to hold a majority in the National Assembly.
At the moment polls show a large group of about 30 per cent of undecided voters who are expected to be swayed by events in the last days of the campaign.
The National Election Commission said last month that a survey it conducted suggests a 10 per cent increase in voter turnout on Wednesday, fuelled by young people in the 20s and 30s.
These voters will mostly go for the DUP or allied left-of-centre parties.
