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The Grand National Party Is Tearing Itself Apart.
Former GNP leader Park Geun-hye said she had been fooled and the public had been duped as well regarding the party¡¯s nominations for candidates for National Assembly seats, and has embarked on a war against the faction loyal to President Lee Myung-bak. And the Lee loyalists, who had joined forces to drive pro-Park lawmakers out of the party, are now fighting amongst themselves. First they fought over who should fill the posts left by ousted pro-Park lawmakers; now they are squabbling over who should shoulder the blame for the party¡¯s declining approval ratings. Some say Rep. Lee Jae-oh, one the most powerful lawmakers in the GNP, should shoulder the blame, while others say Vice Speaker Lee Sang-deuk, President Lee¡¯s elder brother, should take responsibility and leave. Others say both should go, while some say the party should ignore public sentiment and that both should run for National Assembly seats.
Campaigning officially starts when candidates register on March. 25. The train has already begun to leave, but the GNP has yet to confirm who will be aboard it while fighting over who to pull off and who will fill the empty seats. During past administrations, the first several months after the launch of the new government should be when the incoming president¡¯s authority and the power of the administration should be at its peak. But this is the embarrassing state of affairs within the ruling party at the moment. No wonder we are hearing serious concerns being raised about the future of the administration just one month after it was launched.
The reason the GNP is in this mess is because people loyal to the president took irrational steps to turn the party into a bastion of support for him The GNP¡¯s constitution stipulates that a member who has been elected president cannot hold additional posts other than an honorary one within the party. There¡¯s also a regulation that stipulates all GNP members who run in its presidential primary must give up their posts within the party 18 months before the presidential election. The rules ensure that any GNP member aspiring to enter the country¡¯s top office or become president must not get involved in the party¡¯s rule. They were established by the GNP to advance Korean politics by getting rid of the old practice of having the president serve as the party chairman, wielding absolute power over nominations.
The Lee loyalists believed it is more important to fill the party with their kind and ignored these regulations. They ended up ignoring the political expectations of the public, which had matured much more since they were last in power.
The GNP elite did tap into the public¡¯s desire for the ouster of veteran politicians who had been elected based on political connections rather than their abilities, and this resulted in sweeping changes in the candidates for parliamentary seats. But the public did not applaud, because people are unsure of the true motive behind this and felt that the process of removing them was not based on objective standards.
Since he was a candidate himself, President Lee has voiced discontent with politicians who scramble for the feeding troughs while ignoring the public¡¯s needs. He even vowed to create a new political climate. That¡¯s why there were widespread projections that he would try to change the existing roster of GNP politicians.
The latest crisis at the GNP is probably linked to these hopes. And key aides who sensed President Lee¡¯s desire to distance himself from GNP politics may have used this as a chance to use the nomination process as a means to fulfill their own political ambitions. Any way you look at it, the president¡¯s drive to change politics has ended up causing a blood feud within the GNP.
No matter how good the original intentions, policies devised without foreseeing their political ramifications rarely succeed. Watching the instances of official appointments and the repercussions they have triggered ahead of the general election, many people have wondered whether the present administration has the necessary political touch. The GNP¡¯s approval rating plummeted 5 and even 10 percent every time the president appointed a key government official. But nobody within the presidential office even bothered to try and put the brakes on appointments that have been criticized as cronyism. And government ministers appointed amid such criticism turned to cronyism in the way they ran their ministries. As a result, government workers were the first to become cynical of the way the administration appointed people, and this sentiment spread to the public.
President Lee¡¯s forte is economics. As a result, the chief presidential secretary or the senior secretary for political affairs should serve as the president¡¯s ¡°political brain¡±, assisting him to make the right political decisions. But we have yet to hear of these officials offering the president any advice on political decisions. A political vacuum has begun to form around him.
To win back voters, the GNP must acknowledge its mistakes and come up with remedies. Yet both Cheong Wa Dae and the GNP are standing by idly, trusting the latest opinion polls that show the ruling party will emerge victorious. No election in Korea¡¯s history has turned out the way Cheong Wa Dae¡¯s own opinion polls have predicted them. We shall see how the latest poll results will compare with the actual votes the GNP will get on April 9.
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