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In the one-page statement issued yesterday by the younger members of the Grand National Party (GNP) calling on the party's leadership to resign, one can see the nation's opposition party as it really is.
The statement reads that President Roh Moo-hyun's ethics have crashed, and the nation is collapsing because he lacks the skills to run it, but the reality is that when people look at the GNP, they fall into even greater dispair.
When you have a political party accepting illegal campaign contributions by the truck-load, and using its parliamentary majority to release one of their colleges who accepted bribes, it would be unusual if such complains did not arise. The GNP failed to use its mighty parliamentary majority to pass the Korea-Chile FTA bill or the Iraq deployment bill, on both of which hang this county's national interests. For this problem, the GNP has no right to blame either the government or the ruling party. The younger GNP representatives confession, that the "GNP doesn't do what it's supposed to do, and does what it shouldn't do," is how the situation really is.
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GNP Assemblyman Nam Kyung-pil (fourth from left) and other younger legislators urge the leaders of the party to retire from their posts in a press conference held Wednesday at GNP headquarters.
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We're even more disappointed at the GNP.
Right now, the GNP has not done properly even one thing that it promised the citizens it would do, be it in improving personnel, a "nomination revolution," or severing its connections with the politics of old. If the GNP collapses, it has itself to blame. The problem is that the party has a monopoly on opposition to the government and the ruling party.
As long as there's a healthy opposition party, the nation can survive, even if the government and ruling party can't do their jobs. However, if the forces monopolizing the opposing cause the people to dispair even more than the government does, then the people are in real trouble.
The GNP doesn't have much leeway here. As a prominent Assemblyman said yesterday, go out into the windy blizzard. There, you will find both popular sentiment and a path for you to follow.
If you refuse, and remain in your nice, warm room and count your useless gains while making needless calculations, the citizens will ask you to get out of the way so a new, healthy opposition force can be born. This is because the disease the party caught has now become poison to the nation.
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