Election of Kim Dae Jung
(Author's name withheld)

December 1997 Final results:
Kim, Dae Jung         40.3%
Lee, Hoe Chang        38.7%
Rhee, In Je                 19.2%

Turnout was 80.6%;  down from 81.9% in 1992.

By now, you're probably hearing rehashes of how many years Kim Dae Jung (aka "DJ") has spent in prison or under house arrest; how he was kidnapped by Park Chung Hee's go vernment and might have been killed had it not been for U.S. official intervention; how he was sentenced to death by Chun Doo Hwan's regime after the 1980 Kwangju incident; etc., etc. And how Kim is the first opposition candidate to win a presidential election in Korea's history.

When DJ lost his third run for the presidency in 1992 to Kim Young Sam, he publicly vowed to leave politics forever and soon went off to Great Britain to "study unification." He had earlier lost to Park Chung Hee in 1971 (when even Park's ballot counters acknowledged he had garnered 46% of the vote), and to Roh Tae Woo in 1987, when he and Kim Young Sam both insisted on running separately, thus effectively splitting the opposition vote and sending Roh to the "Blue House" with about 36% of
the vote. Kim Young Sam had won about 40% in 1992 against DJ and Hyundai group founder Chung Ju Yung, who took a Perot-ist stab at the top spot.

When Kim Dae Jung reversed his earlier pledge and declared his reentry into the political arena in 1995 (and in the process formed yet another of a string of "DJ" political parties he has led), he was roundly
condemned on virtually all fronts, including even the more liberal/leftist Hankyoreh newspaper. No matter. He knew memories are short in Korean politics.

In this latest, and finally successful, run for the Roses of Sharon (Korea's national flower, "mugunghwa" in Korean), DJ surrounded himself with some very strange bedfellows indeed. He merged his candidacy with that of Kim Jong Pil ("JP"), Park Chung Hee's key lieutenant in his 1961 military coup, then founder and first head of the KCIA, and Park's prime minister in 1973, when KCIA agents kidnapped DJ from a Tokyo hotel and were apparently prepared to kill him until a very stern U.S. warning spared DJ's life. After about 35 years on bitter opposite sides of Korea's political playing field, these two Kims realized their only hopes of achieving power at this late stage (both are over 70) was to put the past aside and throw in with each other. If DJ won, he said, he would make JP prime minister and pursue the cabinet form of government which JP desires, since it's his main opportunity to return to the seat of power. Citizens interviewed in JP's home province voiced concern that JP had been taken in by DJ, who would renounce his promises as soon as the ballot counting was over.

DJ also has among his lieutenants former KCIA officer Lee Jong Chan, a Korea Military Academy graduate who was a key founder of Chun Doo Hwan's ruling Democratic Justice Party (great name, eh?) back when Chun had a court-martial sentence DJ to death on sedition charges which the State
Department at the time termed "far-fetched." Lee had left the DJP's successor, the Democratic Liberal Party (a name nearly identical to Japan's longtime ruling Liberal Democratic Party, after which it was
patently patterned), when it nominated Kim Young Sam in 1992, annoyed that he had not won the nomination himself. He started his own new party (common enough here), but faded into obscurity until taken under his old nemesis' wing.

[Other candidates are not immune to such phenomenon. The splinter Democratic Party, the only opposition party with any semblance of PRINCIPLES (comprising those who refused to follow DJ into yet another party obviously formed only as a vehicle for his presidential run), threw in with the ruling New Korea Party (successor to the DLP) to form the Hannara (Grand National) Party and field their joint candidate Lee Hoe Chang. Lee thus ran with the support of both some remnants of Chun
Doo Hwan's regime and some of the hard-core dissidents whom Chun's people had jailed.]

All of which demonstrates once again, as if any more evidence were needed, that Korean politics is not about policies or principles, but all about power and personalities. Parties are generally the vehicles
of one politician, and power flows down from the summit, not up from the people. The same goes for money. American political parties hold fund-raisers for their candidates; Korean candidates hand out envelopes of cash to their supporters.

In the run-up to this election, DJ found himself having to speak in public on the distinction between not keeping promises (which he has done any number of times) and lying (which he claims he has never done in his life). Apparently he was preparing the public for many more promises to go unkept.

Before the IMF would finally agree to the terms of its bail-out agreement (negotiated at the last minute, as Korea was apparently with 10 days or so of seriously defaulting on billions of dollars in short-term overseas loans), it demanded that all three major presidential candidates sign pledges promising to implement the agreement in its entirety; otherwise the deal was off. DJ refused to sign the requested memorandum, but sent a letter to the Blue House saying he supported the agreement. After the agreement's Dec. 3 signing, DJ was among the first to call for its renegotiation on terms easier for Korea to bear. Such remarks by DJ and others created serious doubts in overseas financial circles that Korea would carry out the stiff reforms mandated by the IMF agreement, and the Korean won began its hellish week of devaluation, from 1,220 to the $1 on Monday to over 1,700/$1 by Friday. DJ was running front page newspaper ads during that week explaining why he demanded a renegotiation. The negative response to such calls grew so deafening, from Korean media as well as foreign observers, that DJ had to claim that he had been misunderstood, and only wanted "additional negotiations" on some details. President Kim summoned all three major candidates and had them all sign with him another reiteration of the unqualified support for the IMF agreement, which requires reforms which will significantly slow the Korean economy's growth and probably bring the loss of over a million jobs. That was last Saturday. Monday the won rallied, Tuesday the government lifted limits on its daily fluctuation, and it has stabilized somewhat over the past few days. There remains, however, understandable suspicion about the sincerity of DJ's assurances, and it may be a while before foreign investors return to Korean markets with open checkbooks.

After he shut up about renegotiating the IMF agreement, DJ declined the opportunity to talk realistically about the tough reforms needed to undo decades of sloppy economic management in Korea. (Bank loans had been allocated primarily on the basis of political pressure and old boy networks, and almost never on the basis of a project's economic viability. Conglomerates got lots of money at government- mandated interest rates which were so low it was silly not to borrow, and kept investing in non productive real estate and expanding rapidly into new enterprises, rather than solidifying their existing businesses. In return, the conglomerates fed huge amounts of money into politicians' coffers -- both government and opposition -- to keep the golden eggs coming.) Instead, DJ stepped up calls for a witch hunt to find and punish (even imprison) those responsible for messing up Korea's economy. He didn't mention the key role he and all other politicians had played over decades of incestuous relations among businessmen, politicians, and government bureaucrats.

I haven't even touched on regional animosities, which stem in part from the (southeast) Kyongsang Provincial roots of Park Chung Hee, Chun Doo Hwan, Roh Tae Woo, and Kim Young Sam, and from centuries of government neglect of the (southwest) Cholla Provinces, home of DJ and site of the
tragic May 1980 Kwangju incident. DJ pulled over 95% of the vote in many Cholla areas, and ran a very distant third in most Kyongsang areas, even behind hopeless spoiler Rhee In Je (who, when he lost the ruling NKP's nomination for president threw a typical snit, founded his own party, and, in an ironic switch on the 1987 election, split the RULING camp and drew off enough votes to give DJ a victory with 39-40% of the vote). DJ has the opportunity to be magnanimous and to decline to exploit his position to punish Kyongsang for decades of anti-Cholla sentiment and government policy, but he has a pretty insistent (and bitter) constituency in Cholla which may make it hard for him to do so.

And as for relations with North Korea, DJ trotted out a ludicrous wish list of things he promised (there's that word again!) to accomplish vis-a-vis the North, many of which would not even be in his power to do, and most of which could have happened long ago except that North Korea doesn't WANT them to happen. Lee Hoe Chang, meanwhile, was more realistic and restrained; he said we can't expect NK to come around to the South's point of view, so it's best to keep the economy strong and be ready to absorb the shock when NK eventually collapses.

Well, I do have to do some work for Uncle Sam today, too, so I'll cut off this screed here. Suffice it to say I'm not delighted with the election results. DJ played to the closed-minded instincts of a nationalistic populace, and I can't say I expect him to rise much above that level when he moves into the Blue House. Also, Korea has its third minority president in a row, and this one also lacks a majority in the
National Assembly (elected in April 1996 to four-year terms). That may change, of course, as some members make opportunistic shifts in party allegiance. There's certainly ample precedent for that.

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Updated December 23, 1997