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The Uri Party's leadership headed by chairman Moon Hee-sang resigned en bloc on Friday to take responsibility for the ruling party's crushing defeat in Wednesday's National Assembly by-elections. They had been in office for a grand total of seven months. The Uri Party will now be headed by an emergency committee until a party convention early next year elects a new Central Committee. The party launched itself in November 2003 as a ˇ°party that will last 100 years.ˇ± This being the fifth team to withdraw in two years, clearly its leaderships have a rather faster turnover.
On average it has taken them five months before they threw in the towel because they failed to heed public opinion. The five leadership teams all ran the party in tune with the so-called reform agenda, with the result that its approval rating fell to the 10 percent range and its poll support in the by-elections on Wednesday stood at no more than 25 percent, about half the 46 percent gained by the main opposition Grand National Party.
The ruling party rank-and-file should have realized by now that the direction the ˇ°fervent believersˇ± in charge of the party's website are driving them is a long way from the majority of the people. But Uri has been unable to adjust its course because its agenda is determined not by its nominal leadership but by the self-confessed ˇ°ordinary party member" in Choeng Wa Dae, who unlike nearly everyone else in the country is a reformer.
Perhaps some officials now think that the party can overcome its present predicament if it calls the two prospective presidential candidates now serving in the Cabinet, who have their bases of mass support, back into the fold. But the problems that bedevil the ruling party are not such that they can be solved by replacing some faces and doing a spot of house-cleaning.
What the people worry about is the future direction of the country, namely whether it can be brought back from the course toward the unexpected this administration has set it on and returned to the path of prosperity. Only if the party promptly readjusts its policies in a way that meets such public sentiment will it be able to escape the scrapheap, never mind lasting 100 years.
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