NEWS ANALYSIS : S. Korean Party Merger Follows Japanese Path : Politics: The new conservative alliance could rule in Seoul as one does in Tokyo. But some question if conditions are comparable.

South Korea’s political savants, by forming what they hope will become their nation’s perennial ruling party, have looked toward Japan for a vision of what the future might bring.

President Roh Tae Woo and two of South Korea’s three opposition leaders shocked their countrymen--and the political rank and file--by announcing this week that they had secretly negotiated to merge their parties into a gigantic conservative alliance. Despite the surprise, the move appears initially to have majority public support.

Officials in Roh’s Democratic Justice Party have made little secret of their ambition to emulate the political machine of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, but already there is criticism that the conservatives may have gone too far in copying Tokyo.

“It’s anachronistic and unrealistic to try to imitate the Japan of 1955 in today’s Korea,” Han Sung Joo, a professor of political science at Korea University, said in a telephone interview from Seoul. “The Japanese conservative party is predicated on factional alignments that operate in a society with a strong feudal tradition. But the kind of personal loyalties and pluralism that work well in Japan are not very conspicuous in Korea.”

The new alliance gives Roh control over more than two-thirds of the National Assembly, where his party previously was the largest but held less than a majority of seats. Now, there will be enough Assembly votes to allow Roh and his supporters to amend the constitution and introduce a cabinet form of government with a prime minister--presumably the key to Japanese-style political stability.

Indeed, perhaps nothing was more revealing of the inspiration behind South Korea’s new super-party than its tentative name, the Democratic Liberal Party. The merger will be completed by May, officials suggested, with a party convention and a reorganization of the Cabinet.

The model of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, was “very much in the minds of the people involved” in the South Korean party merger, Han said. Ironically, however, the LDP is now bogged down in its worst crisis of public confidence since it was formed after the merger of two conservative parties in 1955.

For South Korea, the new political order will simplify the volatile four-party political arena and make it a somewhat unbalanced bipartisan system. It combines the ruling party of Roh, a former general elected in December, 1987, with centrist organizations led by Kim Young Sam and Kim Jong Pil, two of the “three Kims” of the fractious opposition.

What had been the largest opposition group, the progressive-leaning Party for Peace and Democracy (PPD) of Kim Dae Jung, will be left out in the cold and dwarfed by the giant ruling party.

Since April, 1988, the “three Kims” have held a majority in the National Assembly that has made it difficult for Roh--whose election marked the end of nearly three decades of government by military-backed dictators--to run things smoothly.

Political Coup

This week, Peace and Democracy officials quickly denounced the merger as “a political coup d’etat aimed at holding on to power,” and Kim Dae Jung vowed to collect 10 million signatures on petitions seeking elections to challenge the new party.

Some observers predict that Kim Dae Jung and his party will be radicalized by the challenge, drawing closer to the dissident political fringe and to the party’s leftist power base in provincial Kwangju, site of an army massacre in 1980 that has been Kim’s cause celebre.

“It’s a big change, and I think a lot of people feel disoriented, especially the rank and file of the three parties involved,” Han said. “It’s obviously made the PPD feel unhappy and lost, and it has galvanized the anti-system dissidents.”

Yet the initial public reaction appeared favorable, perhaps revealing a popular desire for stability and an end to the emotional atmosphere brought on by National Assembly inquiries into the bloody Kwangju incident and into corruption and abuse of power in the regime of Roh’s predecessor, authoritarian Chun Doo Hwan.

Nearly two years of hand-wringing over Chun’s wrongdoing drew to an inconclusive finish Dec. 31 when Chun testified before the Assembly and denied nearly all allegations against him.

Hastily conducted public opinion polls, taken after the three parties announced their merger Monday, suggested that most South Koreans support the move. A telephone survey of 1,000 people by the state-run television network, Korean Broadcasting Service, suggested that 60% of the respondents favored the merger while 31.6% opposed it. Other similar polls by Seoul newspapers placed the support higher than 50%.

“Nobody is fully satisfied with the development but, realistically, it may have been the only choice,” said Rhee Sang Woo, director of the Institute for East Asian Studies at Sogang University in Seoul. “Anyway, we foresee political stability.”

Specifically, the broad base of support is expected to strengthen Roh’s hand in dealing with labor unrest and other economic problems bedeviling his administration, as well as removing some pressure on his presidency from right-wing power circles and the military.

In a joint statement, Roh and the two Kims said that over the last two years, “the nation has learned the very costly lesson” that the “present four-party setup has been incapable of effectively meeting domestic and international challenges confronting the nation.”

“We have decided to smelt in a flaming furnace the politics of the old era marked by exclusionism, obstinacy, self-righteousness, strife and antagonism,” the statement said.

The payoff for the former opposition leaders is a chance to share power, as well as easier access to political funds. Kim Young Sam is expected to get the No. 2 post of party chairman, and either he or Kim Jong Pil will have a crack at succeeding Roh as paramount leader when Roh’s five-year term expires in 1993. Eventually, the plan appears to be to scrap the presidential system.

No immediate impact is expected for U.S.-Korean economic or military relations. Predictably, however, anti-American campus radicals have attacked the merger as an American conspiracy, observers in Seoul said.

Criticism also was leveled against the political alliance by intellectuals, some of whom characterized the secret negotiations leading up to the decision as undemocratic because party members and the public were not consulted.

“What about all the people who voted for these parties thinking they would serve in the opposition?” asked Park Kwon Sang, a respected commentator who edits the Shisa Journal. “This is an unacceptable breach of faith with the voting public. It’s a devolutionary marriage of convenience that no longer provides room for grievances to be aired. Every dictator in the past has had the same kind of arrangement.”