[The rapid pace at which the two governments on the peninsula are now pursuing rapprochement has much to do with the looming struggle in the South over constitutional reform, an issue to which the foreign press has so far paid little attention. In this part I will introduce the right’s push for a parliamentary system and the role it played in the impeachment of Park Geun-hye. In the next part I will explain the left’s push for a “unification-preparatory” constitution.]
When the former US senator and presidential candidate Mike Gravel talked to my class in Busan several years ago, he praised South Korea’s constitution for allowing more room for direct democracy than the American one. My students nodded benignly enough, but were unmoved. People here feel no great love for their constitution, which was promulgated in 1948 and revised in 1987, under Chun Doo Hwan’s rule. Not that average people can put their finger on what they don’t like about the actual text. At most you tend to hear calls for an American-style system of two four-year terms for presidents, instead of limiting them to one five-year stretch.
In the political elite, on the other hand, there has long been support for changing the presidential system to a parliamentary one, in which most executive power resides in a premier chosen by the National Assembly, while a president elected by direct popular vote handles foreign policy and exercises a symbolic unifying function. This change is necessary, advocates say, in order to end the chronic abuse of power attendant upon the “royal presidency.”
Perhaps some lawmakers really do want the constitution revised for that noble reason. Although there is less disgusting outward pomp to the office here than in the USA, the South Korean president has some powers broader than our own — in regard to the budget, cabinet appointments, pardons and so on. Still, it must be kept in mind that the majority of advocates of the parliamentary system are now on the right side of the aisle, and revere the memory of the very “royal” Park Chung Hee.
The cynic in the street is probably right in assuming that the idea of such a set-up appeals to many in the National Assembly because it would mean a widening of the trough, or at least of opportunities to play premier or minister for several months. Despite the unpopularity of the current system, most South Koreans would rather have to keep a close eye on one president than on hundreds of lawmakers. Older folk also remember the dismal experiment with the parliamentary system in 1960-1961. Opinion polls have thus shown consistent opposition to the restoration of it. This was Kim Dae Jung’s reason (or excuse) for not fulfilling his campaign pledge to make the presidency less “royal” if elected.
Not until Park Geun-hye’s presidency (2013-2017) did the issue make a strong comeback. Conservatives in the National Assembly were then roughly divisible into a faction loyal to Park and one loyal to her predecessor Lee Myung Bak. Naturally his followers had learned to like the presidential system during his occupancy of the Blue House (2008-2013), only to find it inherently despotic again the moment Park took over. What really worried them was the likelihood that she would take revenge for the “nomination massacres” that had occurred during Lee’s rule, when he had excluded many of her followers from candidacies in parliamentary elections.
Sure enough, there ensued the “nomination massacre” of spring 2016, in which even some of the most popular pro-Lee or “non-Park” politicians were bypassed for nominations in favor of the president’s people. From then on calls for a parliamentary system grew in intensity until the Lee-conservative press broke the story of the Choi Soon-sil scandal in the autumn of 2016.
It was just what many pols had been waiting for: a chance to get the public so angry about the status quo that it would finally sign off on a whole new system of government. Conservatives were confident they could remove Park with left-wing help without losing the presidency altogether. They would simply make the returning hero Ban Ki-moon their candidate while pushing hard for constitutional revision, then trounce Moon in the election. What could go wrong?
The bipartisan nature of the push to impeach Park was what led most South Koreans and foreign journalists to assume that either a) the political scene was finally cleaning up its act or b) she had abused power to a particularly heinous extent.
The evidence has turned out to be thinner than was initially believed. The tablet PC on which Choi allegedly edited Park’s Dresden speech had so obviously been tampered with that the court did not consider it in Choi’s trial. It is still unclear how Park’s pressuring of businesses to contribute to this or that national team or foundation differed to a criminal degree from established presidential practices. We have to wait and see, but the recent decision to charge her even with meddling in her own party’s nominations suggests a desperation to find things that will stick. While she may well have deserved impeachment by absolute standards, she was probably less deserving of it than a few of her predecessors.
Someday the role sexism played in the grass-roots fury will be acknowledged. Average people intuited from the start that Park had not been out to enrich herself. What bothered them more than the allegations of corruption was the thought of her being incompetent enough to rely for political and foreign-policy advice on another woman, and a mere housewife at that. This is reflected in many of the jeering songs, pictures and performances that were thought hilariously funny during the candlelight protests. (A “satirical” painting of Park with legs splayed in a gynecological chair had come out in 2012.) As Americans will realize very soon, these aren’t liberals in our sense of the word.
But however the South Korean public was strung along is beside the point. It was conservatives who provided the votes needed to oust Park (and then some), thereby demonstrating, ironically enough, how far from royal the presidency really is. I’m guessing this was the first time in history that the right carried out the wishes of the North’s Rodong Sinmun, which was already demanding and predicting Park’s impeachment in the spring of 2016.
Naturally Park followers and security-minded right-wingers now feel animosity for the “traitors” whom they see as having handed the republic to the left on a platter. What went wrong? The constitutional court upheld Park’s impeachment after a much shorter review than expected, leaving no time for a discussion of constitutional reform; Ban Ki-moon withdrew from contention, for reasons I needn’t go into; the main conservative party nominated a man repellent to most people under 60; and Moon sailed to victory in May 2017 if not to a majority of votes.
The once bipartisan pretense that removing Park was a non-ideological response to her abuses of power is now upheld only by the right-wing impeachers and the foreign press. Upon his election Moon appointed several Gangnam leftists with records of tax avoidance, real-estate speculation, and the Choi-like pulling of strings on relatives’ behalf. This prompted much use of the crypto-Sinitic compound naero nambul, short for “When I cheat, it’s romance, when others do, it’s adultery.”
The left has since boldly reinvented the 2016 candlelight protests as a revolutionary outpouring of mass support for its whole ideological package. Accordingly the trendy pejorative “accumulated ill” (chŏkp’ye), which in 2016 referred to a manifestation of deep-seated corruption, cronyism, etc, is now used in formulations such as: “The closure of the Kaesong Industrial Zone was an accumulated ill.”
