Ruling Party Spurned in South Korea Elections

President Kim Dae Jung’s party placed a distant second in key parliamentary elections as fed-up South Koreans tossed out incumbents and tainted politicians by the score, voted for regional favorites or stayed away from the polls in record numbers, according to unofficial results today.

The outcome means that Kim will head for a first-ever meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in June without the political boost his party had apparently been seeking when the government announced the historic summit just three days before the Thursday election.

Analysts said the party’s weak showing will make it harder for Kim to form a governing coalition or to push his domestic agenda, which includes throwing South Korea open to more foreign investment and forcing the country’s powerful chaebol conglomerates to reform.

“It’s quite a defeat,” said Ahn Chung Si, a political science professor at Seoul National University, noting that anti-Kim sentiment is running so deep that even many voters who dislike the opposition voted against the president’s party. “It’s going to be a really interesting and difficult time for the nation.”

Kim’s Millennium Democratic Party, or MDP, won 115 seats in the 273-member parliament, compared with 133 seats for the opposition Grand National Party, or GNP, according to unofficial results.

“We will be a loyal opposition as long as the ruling party is loyal too--loyal to the people, not to the president,” said a jubilant Lee Bu Young, a leader of the GNP who was out thanking voters in his Seoul district this morning.

The president’s allies were gloomy, noting that South Korea’s glowing economic report card had not helped his party.

“I’m almost certain that the reform process will be still more stalled after this election,” said Kim Tae Dong, a senior economic advisor to the president. “The economic crisis was a disguised blessing for reform, and recovery may be just the opposite.”

Reform-minded citizen groups rejoiced that two-thirds of the candidates they had blacklisted as corrupt or even criminal were defeated. Fifty-seven of the 86 candidates that the Citizens’ Alliance for 2000 General Elections had branded as tax cheats, draft dodgers or otherwise corrupt lost their races, the group said.

Voter disgust at the political establishment was heightened when the Central Election Commission announced that 16% of the more than 1,000 candidates running had served prison terms. Although half of those criminal convictions were for political offenses--a badge of honor for former dissidents who fought South Korea’s military dictatorships--the rest were for such crimes as bribery, assault and tax evasion.

Incumbents and women fared poorly. Of 208 officials running for reelection, 87 were defeated, according to preliminary tallies. Only 15 women were elected--just 5.4% of the new parliament.

Some of the victors may end up forfeiting their seats, however, as 2,834 election-law violations reported during the campaign are investigated, the Joong Ang Daily News reported in today’s editions. “It will not be as in the past, when victory meant ‘not guilty,’ ” the newspaper said.

But the biggest political loser today was former Prime Minister Kim Jong Pil, whose United Liberal Democrats won just 17 seats, down precipitously from 50 seats in the outgoing parliament. Under parliamentary rules, a party with fewer than 20 members will be excluded from floor negotiations with other party leaders, and local media said the future of the party is unclear.

When Kim won the presidency in 1997, his party controlled just 79 seats in parliament. He governed by forming a coalition with the United Liberal Democrats, but that alliance fell apart in December. Now, even if he renews the coalition with the ULD, Kim would not control a majority, and he is expected to renew his efforts to lure independents and defectors from the opposition.

Opposition parties had lambasted Kim’s government for announcing the summit right before the election and had suggested that Kim might have made damaging concessions to North Korea in exchange for the promise of a meeting.

The summit news appeared to have swayed undecided voters from Seoul and environs as well as families hoping for reunions with relatives in the North to vote for Kim’s party, according to exit polls. But it was not enough to give the president control of parliament for the nearly three years remaining in his term.

Voter turnout was a record-low 57.2%, compared with 64% in the last parliamentary election four years ago.

Politicians of both parties blamed the citizens’ blacklists for alienating voters and leaving the impression that all South Korean politicians are corrupt. At the same time, they said, the emergence of strong watchdog groups means that party bosses will be much more careful to select clean candidates in the future.

Many observers were disturbed by the increase in regional antagonism. Kim came into office promising to ease the historic animosity between the southeast and southwest of the country but instead filled many top posts with natives of his Cholla province in the southwest. That has angered the southeast, which produced South Korea’s previous four presidents but now feels isolated. Not one MDP candidate was elected from the southeast, and not one member of the opposition won a seat in Cholla.