Democratic Unity Party slipping up with nomination process

Posted on : 2012-02-28 14:24 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Party’s early momentum waning as leaders appear indifferent to challenges
 Supreme Council members Moon Sung-keun and Park Ji-won(from right) talk about the incident a party member jumped from the roof to his death in Gwangjoo. (Photo by Lee Jung-woo)
Supreme Council members Moon Sung-keun and Park Ji-won(from right) talk about the incident a party member jumped from the roof to his death in Gwangjoo. (Photo by Lee Jung-woo)

By Lee Tae-hee

“Nominations are a core part of general election strategy. The DUP has failed in that early strategy,” said a former Democratic Party lawmaker in charge of organization.

“This is a crisis, but the Democratic Party has no sense of crisis,” said a former DUP official in charge of strategy. 

All those formerly involved with organization and strategy in the DUP are unanimous. The results of a survey conducted by the Hankyoreh on March 24 and 25, which indicate that the credibility of the Saenuri Party’s efforts at reform, including of the nomination process, at 47.3%, ranked higher than the DP’s 38.5%, show that public opinion is the same. 

There is no sense of crisis, however, within the DUP leadership.

Why is this? Some say it is because party leader Han Myeong-sook and other top officials are caught behind a curtain of vested interests. In other words, influential pro-Roh Moo-hyun figures, which have constituted the mainstream of the party since the Uri Party period, and the “486 Group,” whose members have been occupying key positions in the party, are forming an enclosed “inner circle.” Han’s habitual dependence on their debates, analysts say, has prevented her from showing the determination expected by the public and the party’s supporters in matters such as candidate nomination. 
 


At 8pm last Sunday, the DUP’s supreme council held an emergency meeting in the canteen of a large shopping center in Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul. It was a meeting to decide upon areas for strategic candidate nomination. After three o’clock in the morning, the council had still not made its decision.

“You have to start by deciding on a concept for nomination. This then needs to be tested through areas and strategic nominations. We could then decide upon areas in which to run for election, but it’s happened the wrong way round,” said one former lawmaker in charge of strategy.

Perhaps because of this, the DUP’s first round of nominations, far from moving the public by appearing to bring renewal, have been interpreted as “vested interest” nominations centered on those already in office, “indictment nominations” concerning figures on trial on charges of corruption, and “factional nominations” centered on a core group of pro-Roh figures.



Criticisms of a lack of strategy have been made since the first days after the party’s nomination planning team was formed. Frequent complaints were made within the team that its leader, Lee Mi-gyeong, was busy working in her constituency and hardly ever seen. One party official said that the situation had reached the point where the team asked its leader to entrust it with her authority.

Another official said that, while nominations were nominations, the party’s thinking had become paralyzed to a point where only a vague optimism that the party would win existed without any strategy.

When nomination planning team leader Lee called an urgent press conference on February 17, her original aim was reportedly to publicly express that the DUP could not afford to be optimistic in the coming general election. Warning lights appeared to come on inside the party.

At the conference, however, Lee stated that the DUP’s aim was to be the number one party. 

Mobile voting, once regarding as a guaranteed way of making nominations a hit, far from bringing success, is actually functioning as an obstacle. The DUP, however, is doing nothing. Having failed to produce momentum through a nomination revolution, the party is drifting back toward “old-school organizational mobilization,” having lost the wind from the sails of its recruitment of a mobile election team. 



Negotiations with the Unified Progressive Party over an opposition alliance are faltering. Many point out that no hard effort is being made within the DUP to work towards this. Civic groups are criticizing the DUP’s halfhearted and factional attitude toward opposition solidarity and demanding that it immediately resume the opposition alliance, if this means ceasing its nomination process, but the DUP remains aloof.

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