hankyoreh

at the National Assembly in Seoul

By Seong Han-yong and Kim Jong-cheol, political correspondents

The Democratic Party (DP) and independent lawmaker Ahn Cheol-soo’s New Political Vision Party (NPVP) made a surprise announcement on Mar. 2 that they plan to join forces and launch a new party.

Ahn, the NPVP’s central steering committee chairman, joined DP chairman Kim Han-gil for a press conference at the National Assembly in Seoul to announce their agreement to “join in forming a new party for a new politics as soon as possible, using this as a platform for electing a new administration in 2017.”

The DP and NPVP went on to launch working-level talks for the new party the same day. Meanwhile, the NPVP called an immediate halt to its plans for regional inauguration promoter meetings.

“Members from both sides will be taking part as initiators to establish the new party by the end of March,” said Choi Jae-cheon, head of the DP’s strategy and public relations headquarters.

“The integrated party will take the form of a newly created coalition joining Ahn’s new party with the Democratic Party,” Choi added.

The announcement signals a sweeping change in the political landscape in the wake of the 2012 presidential election, with the possibility of an opposition presenting a serious challenge to the ruling Saenuri Party (NFP), which had been benefiting from divisions on the other side of the aisle. More immediately, it means the two sides will be facing off on a relatively equal footing in the greater Seoul area and the Chungcheong area for the June 4 municipal elections and by-elections on July 30. If the new coalition party manages to put up significant results in those contests, they could serve as a springboard for it to enter the 2016 parliamentary election and 2017 presidential election under relatively favorable conditions.

In their statement, Kim and Ahn said they had decided “to honor our pledge to the nation by not making party nominations for this year’s smaller local elections.” Instead, they announced they would be “joining the forces of both sides to launch a new party to pass judgment on the politics of falsehood and lay a cornerstone for the politics of commitment.”

Besides their plans to launch the new party and forgo nominations, Kim and Ahn also agreed on a platform of investigating state institutions’ interference in the 2012 presidential election, emphasizing economic democratization and public livelihoods, and pursuing peace and unification on the Korean Peninsula.

The proposal to join forces was delivered to Ahn by Kim after the DP decided at a Feb. 28 supreme council meeting not to make nominations for the smaller local elections. The following day, the two met twice before agreeing on the new party launch and coalition.

“It looks to be the result of Ahn Cheol-soo’s distress and the Democratic Party’s desperation coming together,” said a senior DP official on condition of anonymity. “There was some talk at the Feb. 28 supreme council meeting about how accepting the decision not to make nominations would open us up to any kind of arrangement, but I had no idea they would actually agree to launch a new party.”

A number of local election hopefuls in the NPVP decamped after Ahn’s announcement on Feb. 24 that he would not be making nominations. The party also struggled with its attempts to bring in possible nominees for metropolitan city and provincial governor seats, including former Minister of Oceans and Fisheries Oh Geo-don and Gyeonggi Province Education Superintendent Kim Sang-gon. Ahn now appears to have made the political decision to give up on launching his own party and ally himself with the DP after sensing the unlikelihood of making any further headway.

The outlook for the coalition party is not all blue skies. One key factor in the success of the move is how Ahn’s supporters take the idea of joining forces with the DP. Ahn’s supporters who abandon him take with them much of the potential synergy effect.

The decision is already drawing criticism from the Saenuri Party. “Now that Ahn Cheol-soo is colluding with the same Democratic Party he himself criticized as the ‘old way of politics,’ he’s entered that old order himself, and his ‘new politics’ is looking pretty stale,” said party spokesman Park Dae-chul.

The Saenuri Party’s next step could be to use its favorable media position for a “carpet-bombing campaign” aimed at drawing Ahn supporters away from the coalition party.

Launching the party and ironing out differences present their own set of problems, each of them daunting. The list includes who will chair the new party, what its name will be, and how nominations will be made.

Once the process is completed and the local election contest is under way, the opposition will also have to clear the significant hurdle of not having nominees. Candidates for municipal government head and council member seats who are affiliated with the DP or NPVP will have to leave their party. This presents a number of legal and political puzzles, including how to deal with candidate crowding and conduct election campaigns. The broader canvas may be more or less set, but a lot of work remains to be done.

In terms of the Political Parties Act, the new party would be classified as a “new coalition party,” with two existing parties coming together under a new name.

Speaking to reporters early in the afternoon on Mar. 2, Choi Jae-cheon explained that the two sides would be creating the new party first in a “third zone” before going through the legal steps of an inter-party merger.

Kim Han-gil’s remarks about “uniting through a new party in a ‘third zone’” during his press conference with Ahn that morning had led some to speculate that the two parties would be disbanded first and then reorganized. By the afternoon, it became clear that the plan was for the new party to be created first, with a merger to come afterwards.

Now the two sides are set to start work by joining in on the launching of that “third zone” party. The plan is currently to form a preparatory team with equal representation (three members from each side). Efforts to formally launch the NPVP were called off on Mar. 2.

Once the preparatory team sets up a preparatory committee and meets the legal requirements by forming at least five metropolitan and provincial branches, a vote is scheduled on a merger with the DP. The plan for now is to finish this process by the end of March and begin nominations and other municipal election preparations by April.

The decision to form an entirely new coalition party besides the NPVP is seen as a way of allowing Ahn to avoid his party being simply absorbed into the DP - something he would be unlikely to accept - while holding on to the DP’s legal rights and political assets. DP lawmakers do not stand to lose anything from their party being disbanded, but losses for the party as a whole would be considerable, as it would have to give up state subsidies that are allocated by general election polling rate.

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