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Ever since it was founded in November 2003, the ruling Uri Party has called itself unique. With Uri's emergence, Korean politics has been able to rid itself of the evil practices of the past, it says. That sounds as if the party was somehow ¡°chosen¡± by the zeitgeist. The party described itself, grandiosely, as a group of democratic and peaceful reformers. When it became the majority party after the general election in April 2004, it launched a project to "correct past wrongs" of the 100-year-long modern history of the country. The ruling party members seemed to believe that the nation¡¯s history started again when they took power.
In the three years and two months since its founding, the Uri Party¡¯s members have claimed they are different from everything in the past. Whenever the president and the ruling party were at odds over policies, they did not try to iron out differences but urged the people to watch an experiment called "separation of ruling party and government." They did not back off even when they were slammed as incompetent, highhanded, and even hopeless. They countered these criticisms by saying it was all part of trial and error in the process of undertaking a political experiment.
Now the Uri Party is furtively trying to burn its bridges. Since the beginning of this year, Uri members have held meetings of one kind or another every day, the only subject being how to wrap up their party. At every meeting, party leaders, lawmakers and ordinary members are busy discussing ways to do away with it.
The reason is simple. They believe they can¡¯t win an election again as the Uri Party. They know that if nothing changes, they will suffer a crushing defeat in the presidential election in December and the general election in April. In Korean politics, it is common for party members to found new ones or change their party¡¯s name with the approach of elections. It seems almost churlish to take issue with this kind of thing. But none have been quite so brazen. In the past, political parties tried to disguise any such revamp with a plausible excuse, whether the people believed them or not. Even in 2003 when they bolted from the Millennium Democratic Party to found the Uri Party, they tried to justify their action with the need for political reforms, and to some extent they won public sympathy.
But now Uri members offer no justification for their plans to found a new party. Apparently they will try to find one once they have burned their bridges. In this, the Uri Party is regressing beyond the past it has so vehemently criticized. The defectors are apparently trying to build a ¡°grand ruling structure¡± to win the presidential election: an influential Uri member said this was ¡°urgent.¡± The argument is that because the Grand National Party's presidential hopefuls are much more popular, the ruling camp has to build a structure encompassing their regional strongholds and the generations and ideologies that traditionally work in their favor. In that regard, the would-be defectors are largely in agreement with those who want to refurbish the party first. For some reason they are confident that they can compete with the Grant National Party's candidate -- no matter who their own candidate will be -- if they succeed in building that grand structure after founding a new party and recruiting new members. They even believe they can win with a handful of showy political events.
But in formulating these ideas, they seem unconcerned how much the people have suffered from the political experiment or how much damage it leaves behind. They just want to burn their bridges, Uri-style.
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