Uri Party Workshop Ends in Victory for Pragmatists 63 Percent of Uri Lawmakers Value China Over U.S.

The biggest debating point of the workshop was whether the party’s direction should be clearly ideological reformist or pragmatical reformist. One side said that the general election results took the character of a social revolution and the party’s policies should reflect that. They proposed that the party’s ideological direction be clearly determined. On the other side, you had those who, under the premise that today is an era beyond ideology, who felt the party should concentrate on stabilizing the living condition of the people. They proposed that unnecessary left-right tensions be lessened and called for reforms to rescue the economy taken through a pragmatic approach. In the end, there were many more lawmakers on the side of pragmatic reform.

The Uri Party has been cynically called a “mixed-broth party.” It’s the trend, however, for a diverse spectrum of ideologies and policies to be mixed up within in one party, so this isn’t just the Uri Party’s problem. Even more important is that the party keeps its center so that it can formulate policies properly as the result of debate, or will even debate results be a “mixed broth.” That the Uri Party showed the capacity to work out its policy line issue, a potentially thorny one, through debate is one worthy of positive evaluation.

The Uri Party’s move toward a pragmatic, centrist line is a fortunate one. Our economy only appears to be doing well because of exports; investment and domestic demand are not recovering properly, and it’d hard to see how the economy will pan out in the future.

Even more, 187 or 299 legislators in the 17th National Assembly are first term lawmakers. In this situation, should the ruling party clumsily put forth mistaken, ideologically-flavored economic prescriptions and worsen the economy, we may loose out in a global competition that doesn’t allow the time to recover from such mistakes.