Slow Going in Seoul

South Koreans will have the chance in December to vote indirectly for their next president, but no suspense attaches to the outcome of that balloting. Roh Tae Woo, nominated this week by the ruling Democratic Justice Party, can confidently expect to take office next Feb. 25 as the successor to President Chun Doo Hwan. Roh’s inauguration will be a milestone of sorts, marking what the regime is pleased to cite as the first peaceful change of leadership in Korea’s modern history. In this context, though, peaceful is a relative word. As student riots over the last few days have shown, the pending transfer of power represents something less than a consensual decision.

Roh (pronounced No) is a lifelong friend of Chun and, like him, a former general. But Roh is regarded as the more broadly experienced, a listener rather than a talker, and possibly more flexible than the highly unpopular Chun. In Roh’s acceptance speech to the party convention he strongly endorsed adoption of “the ideas, system and practices of democracy”--adding quickly, however, that none of this could come overnight. That no doubt was meant to reassure right-wingers in the military and elsewhere that Roh won’t move with unseemly haste to jeopardize the ruling group’s hold on power.

The absence of a functioning democracy in South Korea has not stood in the way of enormous economic progress. Expanding prosperity--and with it growing national pride--does seem to have made many, perhaps most, South Koreans wary about activities that seem to threaten stability. This represents not so much an endorsement of the status quo as a concern about the proffered alternative to it. The regime has been helped, too, by a growing impression that its main political opponents are more interested in personal power than in pragmatic cooperation to achieve evolutionary democratic change.

Certainly the South Koreans want, and certainly they deserve, far greater guaranteed political rights and civil liberties than a succession of repressive governments has given them. Roh, like Chun, says that constitutional revision can’t come until after Seoul plays host to the 1988 Summer Olympic Games. Perhaps. But there is nothing to prevent the ruling party from unilaterally moving to expand basic freedoms well before then. South Korea’s next president should begin drawing up an agenda for progressive popular change right now.