On the South Korean Presidential Race
— B.R. Myers

[Note: This is the start of a thread on the race; I will be posting updates until 9 March.]

“There’s never been a presidential election like this one,” the newspapers keep saying. Because the two parties are already looking beyond it to “democratic integration,” they’ve been going easy on each other, to the annoyance of their respective voter bases. Most of the ideological noises made thus far have been of the integrating sort. The left-wing candidate Lee Jae-myung has praised Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan for their economic policy, while his conservative rival Yoon Seok-yeol has again pledged to enshrine the spirit of the “Gwangju Democratization Movement” (May 1980) in a new preamble to the constitution.

Most of the time the two candidates just promise extravagant hand-outs, and say disapproving things about each other’s moral failings. Their followers are remarkably impervious to bad news. It seems no number of serious allegations about the corruption of Lee and his wife can keep his approval ratings under 35%. Conservatives are no less ready to shrug off the fact that Yoon was until 2019 Moon Jae-in’s loyal servant, and a left-winger by his wife’s proud account. He’s still reluctant to criticize Moon by name. The Christian right overlooks even the couple’s interest in shamanism, talismanic symbols and fortune-telling, although baseless rumors of weird Blue House rites did much to turn it against Park Geun-hye in 2016. (By the way, Western observers who want to treat shamanism as a kooky right-wing thing should read about the role it played in the minjung movement.)

The main issue dividing left and right remains North Korea, but the two parties disagree with each other much less strongly about it than their bases do. Last year the opposition party framed the Seoul mayoral election as an opportunity to protest the government’s obsession with inter-Korean relations. No sooner was Oh Se-hoon elected in a landslide than he vowed to support the bid for a Seoul-Pyongyang Olympics.

Having argued already that the local right isn’t as hardline as the foreign press makes out, I want to make clear in this post that pro-Northism has always been more moderate than Western or Japanese radicalisms. One of the things that drove the student leader Kim Young-hwan from Marxism-Leninism into the figurative arms of the Great Leader was the film The Killing Fields (1984), about the Khmer Rouge. Seeking a kinder, gentler socialism, he found it in the bland truisms of Juche Thought, as well as in North Korean radio broadcasts, which urged the campus protest movement to employ more populist rhetoric and tactics than its Marxist-Leninist core was then using.

Not surprisingly his National Liberation or NL group (known here by that English acronym), ended up outnumbering the Leninists by a ratio of about 9:1. To its credit neither faction went in for the terrorist killings we associate with the Rote Armee Fraktion or the Brigate Rosse. While the Leninist youth were big on throwing Molotov cocktails, the NL protesters staged the more effective downtown lie-ins of the so-called June 1987 Struggle.

Although mythologized nowadays (as in 1987: The Day Comes) as the driving force behind democratization, the student protest movement was monolithically abstentionist and in favor of “people’s democracy,” despite its belated strategic alliance with the bourgeois opposition. A good book on this subject has just been put out by Min Gyeong-u, an oft-imprisoned former official of the Pan-Korean Alliance for Reunification. It wasn’t pro-North students like himself, he says, but Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung who forced the Chun regime to allow direct elections.

Let me just say something here about the word “pro-North.” Globalization globalizes taboos, so Korea watchers are now as nervous about calling people “pro-North” as South Koreans themselves have become. For some reason “pro-” is thought to express something far more extreme in this connection than it does in all comparable ones. You can call South Koreans pro-American without implying they want another US military occupation. But you can’t attribute pro-Northism to South Koreans without some Western fool on Twitter accusing you of thinking they want a North Korean takeover. Even saying that Moon Jae-in admires the country is considered a horrible slander, although the address he delivered to a packed stadium up there in 2018 speaks for itself.

I could understand it if the Korea watchers flying off the handle at the word “pro-North” considered the DPRK as impossible for any sane person to like as Pol Pot’s Cambodia. But no, these tend to be the same people who tell us what a wonderful place it is when you get to know it. So forgive me if I find their jeering a little forced, and “double down” on my use of the term in question: South Korea’s nationalist left is pro-North.

But there have always been differences of opinion inside this ideological community. Even the hardcore students who slogged through Juche texts in the 1980s could be divided into those who did and those who didn’t accept the Leader Theory twaddle. (The latter group was larger.) There was also a branch of the NL movement that refused to take orders from the North’s southward radio broadcasts. To my knowledge none of these groups wanted KPA tanks to come rolling down again like in 1950. They wanted — just as Kim Il Sung professed to want — a transition stage on the way to unification, namely federation or confederation.

Here the Westerner, determined to keep rooting for what CNN tells him is the “liberal” South Korean party, asserts that the nationalist left must have abandoned its earlier beliefs. But age doesn’t necessarily moderate people. (I’m more radical about animal rights now than I was 20 years ago.) The most prominent members of today’s ruling party refuse to renounce the National Liberation movement. They still consider the “poorer but purer” Korea the more legitimate state, just as it’s routinely presented in those inter-Korean buddy movies and romance dramas the Moon government likes subsidizing. Min Gyeong-u has remarked on how radical (gwagyeok hada) many people who went to university 30-some years ago still are. The president’s own worldview as expressed in public-holiday speeches is straight out of the 1980s. Whatever he may say to his Western counterparts, his base sees no reason why the North should denuclearize, and holds Washington responsible for the ongoing crisis. The efficacy of appeasement, a word which in Korean lacks the negative associations it has in English, is still wholeheartedly believed in.

One plank most pro-Northers  certainly have abandoned is the “Yankee go home” line. Yes, this is partly because they don’t want Kim Jong Un to do anything crazy. But they also understand which half of the peninsula the US-ROK alliance has done a better job of protecting since the truce. Make Yankee go home, and South Korea ceases to be a human shield deterring even the most limited strike on the North.

The goal of the nationalist left, then, is still an inter-Korean confederation, or “de facto unification” as many (including Lee Jae-myung) prefer to call it, but on paper this is a remarkably loose and tame affair. We’re told it would come down to little more than routine summits, a constitutionally anchored commitment to cooperate economically, and some sort of EU-type, supra-state body to administer the partnership. Let’s leave aside for now the restrictions on anti-North expression that would be sure to accompany such a set-up here. Let’s also disregard the question of whether (and why) the North would be interested in it. My point is that the concept is probably moderate enough for the Minjoo and the People Power Party to integrate over in the near future — or at least to join in removing all constitutional obstacles to. The sanctions currently in place would give the conservatives cover with their voters: Relax, it’ll never come to fruition.

In any case I don’t see that a President Yoon would have much choice but to go along with this, and with whatever else the Minjoo-run National Assembly chose to make a stand on. He’d be lucky to serve a full term anyway. Already some are saying a Yoon victory in March would constitute a “coup d’état.” The implication is that street resistance would have to begin at once, probably before his inauguration in May, for the nationalist left reserves the right to remove or at least neutralize a president if voters pick the wrong one. This sort of thinking goes back to the protest movement too, the apex of which was the May 1991 Struggle to topple President Roh Tae Woo — whose successor was due to be elected the following year. But that’s one episode of modern history there won’t be a movie about.

UPDATE: 9 February 2022: Protecting President Moon

Edward Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society [1958; not, as I had originally written, The Unheavenly City] has received quite a bit of attention in South Korea, where sociologists have been struck by the parallels between southern Italy (as he describes it) and their own society. I like Banfield’s anecdote about how a mere payment dispute induced a Monarchist Party member to join the Communist Party, only to defect back again as soon as the problem was resolved.

Of course that wouldn’t fly in North Korea; defect from their monarchist party and you’d better keep running. But here in the South I see a leftist lawyer speaking out on behalf of Yoon Seok-yeol, and Lee Myung Bak’s former nuclear negotiator stumping for Lee Jae-myung. Self-styled followers of Park Geun-hye have come out for Lee too, on the grounds that Yoon put Park in prison on trumped-up charges. (Which is an odd motivation considering that Lee, although a mere mayor at the time, was one of the first to call for her impeachment.) And in the city of Ulsan, about 200 Minjoo Party members, declaring themselves disgusted with Lee’s corruption, have defected to the conservative opposition.  Rumor has it that whether the independent candidate Ahn Cheol-soo throws in his lot with Yoon or Lee will depend on who can offer him the best post in the next government.

I suspect the above has as much to do with Korea’s patrimonial tradition as with what Banfield referred to by the somewhat unfortunate term “amoral familism”; so many high-paying, perk-laden jobs come up for grabs with each new administration that it pays to be open-minded. If the aisle-crossings seem especially numerous now, it’s because the ideological gap between the two main camps has never been narrower, due mainly to the leftward drift of the right.

Many Moon-loyalists are thus still undecided about who to vote for, because they can’t figure out whether Lee or Yoon is more likely to have their man prosecuted when he steps down. (The Blue House’s alleged meddling in the Ulsan mayoral election would be enough to get things rolling.) Implicitly acknowledging that Moon is vulnerable to prosecution, a Minjoo lawmaker in Lee’s camp has assured the party’s base that he’s the only candidate who “can watch over President Moon Jae-in well,” the other fellow being likely to “inflict harm on him through an investigation.” This may be one reason why the mounting allegations against the Minjoo candidate are not hurting him that much in the polls: Moon’s many followers may be reasoning that if anyone now has an incentive to stop the custom of presidents sending their predecessors to prison, it’s Lee.

UPDATE: 11 February 2022: Strong Anger

In an interview with the JoongAng Ilbo the other day, Yoon was asked if as president he would subject the Moon administration to a “purge of accumulated evils,” i.e. an investigation into corruption and abuse of power. Moon himself came to power on pledges to carry out such a purge against the Park administration. Instrumental in the wave of arrests that followed, which saw almost 200 former officials sent to prison with remarkable speed, was Yoon Seok-yeol, who rose to the post of prosecutor general as a result.

Until that interview Yoon had asserted that he considers Moon an honest man whose underlings have let him down. He has to take this mild position if he wants a) to win over Lee-disdaining Minjoo voters and b) to work as president with a National Assembly dominated by Moon loyalists.

On the other hand Yoon knows that many conservatives now plan to boycott the election, claiming to see no meaningful difference between him and Lee. So in answer to the question, Yoon said, yes, of course, a “purge” would take place if necessary, in accordance with the law.

Surprised to hear the opposition party candidate sounding like an opposition party candidate, Moon responded by saying through a spokesman: “I express strong anger, and demand an apology” for “treating the current government, without basis, as an object of an accumulated-evils investigation.” (In its translation the Korea Herald rendered “I express strong anger” as “I am deeply resentful.”)

In fact there’s quite a bit of evidence that the Blue House has abused its power, especially in connection with the Ulsan mayoral election and the shutdown of a nuclear reactor, but Yoon rushed to explain that he and the president are “of the same mind”:

Our President Moon has always emphasized the need for investigations without sacrosanct areas, in accordance with principles and the law.

[Note that in the above the possessive pronoun connotes affection or good will.]

I too have said that official corruption and irregularities must be handled in accordance with laws, principles, and a fair system.

Meaning that an investigation would not necessarily be a matter of “political retaliation.” But even when there is evidence that an administration abused power, Koreans tend to regard it as score-settling if the next president lets prosecutors go after its officials. Roh Moo Hyun, who killed himself in 2009 after being apprised of the case against him, is considered a martyr here; Moon referred to the cautionary “tragedy” of his death in that interview I just mentioned. The reason Kim Dae Jung is still held up as a model of integrative spirit is because he turned a blind eye to the wrongdoing of the government that preceded his.

Why then (you ask) was there no outcry against the 2017-19 purge of Park and her people? Because the opposition party and media also needed it to take place, in order to justify their calls for her impeachment — calls that had actually been motivated by the drive for constitutional revision.

This whole episode must be seen as a blunder on Yoon’s part; he has spooked the Lee-mistrusting left without convincing conservatives that he’s one of them.  And Moon, the opposition party now alleges, has broken the South Korean law forbidding presidents from siding openly for or against a particular candidate.

In an interview on 10 February, Moon also said in regard to Yoon that whether it’s election season or not, sowing discord and division is not the way to “go towards a politics of integration.” There’s that word again.

UPDATE: 17 February 2022: Lee Changes His Tune

“Everyone agrees,” Professor Jeong Byeong-gi (Yeungnam University) wrote in the left-leaning Kyunghyang a few days ago, “that the main problem with our politics is the imperial presidential system.” That may indeed be the consensus of South Korean journalists, academics and politicians these days, but I doubt if one in ten average citizens would agree with it, or with the assertion that “the fundamental reform of changing the presidential system to a parliamentary one is necessary.” If any institution has a worse reputation here than the presidency, it’s the National Assembly.

There’s no arguing with the professor, however, that by this yardstick of reform-mindedness, “Yoon Seok-yeol is ahead of Lee Jae-myung.” Since the start of his campaign Lee has stated a few times, to the disapproval of many in his party, that he’s no more interested in a parliamentary system than the public is. At most he would support the change from one five-year presidential term to an American-style four-year term with the possibility of re-election (which, as a few critics have pointed out, would hardly weaken the Blue House).

Lee could afford to play the maverick in this fashion when he was beating Yoon in the polls, but the (ostensible) conservative is now slightly ahead according to most of them. Particularly damaging to the former governor’s popularity have been recent allegations that his wife had two provincial government employees at her beck and call, their daily challenge being to find ways to charge family expenses to the taxpayer. Meanwhile the investigation into the Daejang-dong development scandal has been progressing at a tempo which in itself reflects Lee’s lack of Blue House support. (The wheels of justice grind far more slowly for President Moon’s kind of people, i.e. veterans of the nationalist-left protest movement.) That investigation has just yielded more momentous revelations, but the talk of expensive Lee family meals charged to various Seongnam-municipal  and then Gyeonggi-provincial government accounts is easier for the public to understand.

Lee has thus felt compelled to strike more conformist notes on reform, pledging to “form an integrated citizens’ government in solidarity and union with all political forces supportive of political change,” and to implement a system whereby the National Assembly would put forth one or two candidates for prime minister, a post to which Lee now agrees to assign more powers. If necessary, he added, he would serve a four-year term, and even refrain from talking of a Lee Jae-myung administration. This doesn’t quite add up to a parliamentary or even a semi-presidential system, but it’s about as far in the direction of one as Yoon has said he wants to go. Whether this reassures the Moon loyalists in the National Assembly that they would be able to prevent a President Lee from allowing their leader to be prosecuted is another matter.

UPDATE: 18 February 2022: Incel Election?

The literary historian George Saintsbury wrote of “the sound rule that anonymous writing should never be personal,” and took Leigh Hunt to task for violating it. But Hunt at least encouraged one great poet and wrote a few excellent poems himself. This is more than can be said for the DC-based lawyer and member of the Korea lobby who, when not reviling the Moon government’s critics on Twitter under the handle “TK of AAK,” shills for it in slightly more measured prose under the name S. Nathan Park. (Many of his older and more abusive tweets were recently deleted.)

A few days ago Unherd published an article of Park’s entitled “Inside South Korea’s incel election.” The gist: If Yoon wins the election on 9 March, despite the marvelous record of “liberal” Moon Jae-in, the “most popular president in [the ROK’s] democratic history,” it will be in large part because the conservative party’s chairman Lee Jun-seok has had such great success in riling up young misogynists who aren’t getting enough sex.

Korean conservatives have found a new lease on life by appealing to sexism and male grievance politics. If Yoon Seok-yeol does prevail on 9 March, his victory will be touted as the triumph of anti-feminism. That will be an ominous sign for South Korea’s future.

No one who has been following South Korea’s English-language press for more than a few weeks will be taken in by the piece, but let me just set out the main countervailing facts as concisely as possible.

• The Moon administration is considered by most left-wing commentators to have been a disappointment. (Many of them judge even his performance on the inter-Korean front quite harshly, or more harshly than I do; as I’ve explained here, there’s no way for overt inter-Korean relations to progress beyond the state of US-DPRK relations without endangering the North’s security.) To quote the left-wing Hankyoreh: “Moon’s performance has been dismal…. Nor does Moon have anything to show in terms of political reform.” This despite his party’s having enjoyed a comfortable majority in the National Assembly for the past two years.

• Moon’s current approval rating is 40%.

• Polls indicate that only about 40% of the electorate want to see another Minjoo government. Alas, there aren’t nearly enough young men in this country (as we provincial university professors know better than anyone) for the anti-feminist portion of them to make up a substantial part of the over 50% of voters who want a change.

• In 2019 the former nationalist-left governor of South Chungcheong Province was sentenced to a three-and-a-half year prison term for the protracted sexual exploitation of a female provincial employee. The nationalist-left mayor of Seoul committed suicide in 2020 after a city employee reported him for sexual harassment. (The frightened woman was then attacked on Moon-loyal social media for making a fuss over nothing.) The nationalist-left mayor of Busan had to resign that same year amid charges of sexual assault. The last two of these scandals were followed by conservative landslides in mayoral elections — victories which S. Nathan Park attributes to, of all things, a surge of hostility toward women.

  

• The nationalist left’s sense of humor shows that it’s anything but liberal, let alone feminist. In 2012 a media personality who had joked publicly about raping and killing Condoleezza Rice was nominated by the Minjoo to run for a National Assembly seat. (He lost.) Nor can there be any denying the misogynist overtones of much of the criticism of Park Geun-hye between 2012 and 2017. (See the “satirical” picture above.) Since last year the nationalist left has tried to “slut-shame” Yoon’s wife by alleging that she was a bar hostess in her younger years. Mockery of her plastic surgery is on the rise; a middle-aged singer loyal to Lee Jae-myung has just put out a song entitled, “The Woman who Looks like Michael Jackson.”

• The conservative party chairman is now unpopular among Yoon’s supporters, as witness the daily excoriation to which he is subjected on popular Youtube channels like Garosero. There is general unease over his reluctance to criticize Moon, which exceeds even Yoon’s, and the support he gets from some left-leaning commentators as a “reasonable conservative.”

• As for Lee Jae-myung: Rather than take responsibility for his family’s misuse of government employees and expense accounts to private ends, which could hardly have continued for as long as it did without his knowledge, he has had his wife and a female employee take the fall. (See the previous update.)

• Like Moon, he does indeed seem to appeal more to young female voters and less to young males than Yoon does, but considering the Minjoo’s record over the past five or so years, I think this can be sufficiently explained in regard to longer-standing, Korea-transcending gender differences in support for higher taxation and social welfare. In any case, the latest poll (reported on in the Hankyoreh) puts Lee Jae-myung’s popularity among South Koreans in their 20s at 20%, so clearly most young women are no more interested in a continuation of Minjoo rule than most young men are.  (The incel- or feminist-relevant issues that Park makes so much of do not feature in the pollster’s breakdown of voters’ reasons for preferring this or that candidate.)

Whether writing under his own name or as “TK,” S. Nathan Park always seems to proceed from the assumption — perhaps a correct one — that his readers are too parochial or dim-witted to get their Korea news from anything but an American source. Thus does he omit all mention of the scandals now besetting Lee Jae-myung, which are doing far more to boost his lackluster rival’s poll numbers than anything else.

UPDATE: 23 February 2022: No Costco in Gwangju 

“There is such a thing as the Jeolla viewpoint,” a European couple said somewhat wearily to me after a year in the region, “and everyone there seems to have it.” But the southwest has been looking less monolithically supportive of the nationalist-left candidate than everyone expected. Recent polls have put Yoon’s popularity in Jeolla and Gwangju at a whopping 18%. This is partly due to his success in wondering aloud, on a recent campaign stop, why the city of 1.5 million residents — which would put it between Philadelphia and San Diego in an American list — doesn’t have a single megamart or big shopping mall.

That the news of this lack was at first indignantly denied by ruling-party officials in Seoul, and took even the conservative media by surprise, shows how isolated from the rest of the ROK the southwest still is — or, to be more exact, how few outsiders who are not of the Jeolla diaspora ever go there for a visit.

Upon confirming that there is indeed no Costco, E-Mart or Starfield mall in Gwangju, some Minjoo members explained that it’s because local merchants don’t want them around. Well, of course they don’t; but other cities in Korea have overridden such opposition and continue to do so. It has been uniquely effective in Gwangju only because the Minjoo power elite wants to keep Big Retail out too. Ideology is at work here. One Moon-loyal panelist responded to Yoon’s problematization of the issue by saying clumsily that “putting a brand-name watch on a poor person doesn’t make him rich.”

Such talk is of a piece with the viewpoint mentioned above, central to which is the claim that Jeolla was so cruelly held back by the Gyeongsang-centric military dictatorships that it still hasn’t caught up to the rest of the country. Paradoxically enough this mythohistory goes hand in hand with pride in the southwest’s preservation of a more rural and sobak han (benevolently naive), therefore more “purely Korean” way of life. Hence the common assumption that Jeolla somehow represents the true will of the nation (minshim) regardless of what national polls say. It’s sort of an aggrieved version of Texans’ belief that their state is the most quintessentially American one, that the Dallas Cowboys are “America’s team,” etc.

Whatever other elements go into this victimhood regionalism – if I may adapt J.H. Lim’s term victimhood nationalism – the bloc voting that results has served the nationalist left well enough to make it worth cultivating. The mood in Jeolla matters so much because its diaspora is so numerous, especially in Seoul – which is why most district chiefs in the metropolis are from the area.

But word has finally got around in Gwangju that the city’s per capita GDP is higher than megamart-rich Busan’s, and locals, the younger ones in particular, are wondering why they can’t live accordingly. When polls appeared showing a solid majority in support of change, Lee Jae-myung — who had only just accused Yoon of “far-right populism” for bringing up the issue — pledged to help the city reach a compromise between supporters and opponents. It has been odd to see the two candidates treating this municipal affair as a president’s business, despite agreeing that the office must be weakened.

UPDATE: 4 March 2022: Asymmetric Mudslinging

Like all Americans here I relish the civilized escapability of Korean election campaigns. On a 40-minute trip from Yeoju to the Democratization Movement Memorial Museum the other day I saw no indication that the country was about to choose its next leader. And this is the heart of Lee Jae-myung country.

President Moon isn’t even allowed to express support for the ruling party’s candidate. Then again, it was pretty obvious why he chose to claim in his March 1 speech that the Kim Dae Jung government was the first democratic one in Korea’s history. (This remark elicited a swift protest from the Kim Young Sam Center for Democracy.) Another signal of sorts was the decision of a candidate for the obscure New Wave Party to abandon his run and join hands with Lee. The man in question, Kim Dong-yeon, had been rumored to be Moon’s choice of a last-minute substitute for Lee should the latter have to bow out early. Yet on the same day a group of Moon-loyal “honey badgers,” as they call themselves, came out in support of Yoon Seok-yeol.

The third-party candidate Ahn Cheol-soo had been expected to live up yet again to his name, a homonym for the Korean word for withdrawal. The only question had been which of the two main candidates would win his favor; now of course we know. The assumption is that Yoon promised him a few ministerial posts to distribute among members of his party, which will now merge with the People Power Party. (Yoon couldn’t simply promise to make him premier, as the Minjoo majority in the National Assembly would have to sign off on that.) This makes me wonder how Yoon could afford to give a few additional posts to Minjoo people — as he would have to do to live up to his promise of an “integrated government” — without making conservative voters feel thoroughly duped.

What I found more interesting, since Ahn stands for nothing in particular, was an electoral alliance that didn’t quite come to pass: Lee Jae-myung reached out invitingly to the arch-conservative candidate Cho Won-jin, a Park-loyalist firmly opposed to the constitutional enshrinement of the spirit of Gwangju 1980. Even by Korean standards of bedfellowship this was a bit much, and Cho evidently felt the same way, explaining his “firm refusal” by saying simply, “Our ideologies are different.” It was an odd proposal from a strategic viewpoint too, since Cho’s candidacy can only cut into Yoon’s vote.

It would be wrong to conclude from such episodes that the Minjoo has abandoned ideological principles to the extent the People Power Party has. A nationalist-left candidate trying to get a conservative to drop out of the race is something quite different from a conservative – an ostensible conservative – positioning himself as the true heir to the nationalist-left tradition, the way Yoon does with his constant homages to Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun.

One could of course argue that Kim and Roh were both more conservative than Moon. It’s also true that Lee Jae-myung has said kind words about the military dictators’ economic policy, as if it hadn’t consisted to a large extent of suppressing workers’ wages, which for the braver and bolshier gender in the vanguard of the labor movement translated into things like being doused with fecal water and beaten with steel pipes.

What matters here, however, is not history but the mnemo- or mythohistory generally agreed upon. The so-called Miracle on the Han River is now remembered mainly as proof that government intervention in the economy works wonders, a message harmless enough for a nationalist-left candidate to invoke. The myth of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun, on the other hand, is inseparably bound up with the Sunshine Policy. Yoon’s invocation of it is by no means nullified by his noises about tolerating no guff from North Korea, which recall remarks made by Kim, Roh and Moon on the campaign trail. He cannot live up to that part of his rhetoric without running afoul of the National Assembly.

The two main candidates are still ideologically far enough apart for their docile voter bases to consider the election on March 9 hugely important. The die-hard left-wing third of the populace will hold its nose and vote for Lee, just as the die-hard conservative quarter of it will vote disdainfully for Yoon. If the latter candidate ends up winning, it will be because the free-floating vote is so big here, and many more undecideds fear the kleptocracy that the right warns against than fear the “prosecutor’s republic” the left warns against.

One reason for this is that the Moon camp itself made much of Lee’s alleged dishonesty back when it perceived him as a rival. It was the left-wing entertainment industry that put out the movie Asura (2016), about a corrupt mayor pushing a land development project in “Annam”; it was the pro-Moon Youtubers who had a field day with Lee’s foul-mouthed telephone call to his sister-in-law, and with his effort to have an older brother sectioned (who, in his own recorded conversations, seemed the more stable of the two men).

Another reason is that the left cannot fully explain its fears of prosecutors running rampant under a Yoon presidency — fears shared by old-school right-wing pundits like Jeong Gyu-jae — without admitting that Yoon and his colleagues played fast and loose with the law during the Moon administration’s purge of conservatives (“accumulated ills”) in 2017-2019. This forced reticence has left voters wondering what was so horrible about Yoon’s insistence on prosecuting Cho Kuk and his wife, two members of the Minjoo camp against whom the evidence of document forgery appears to have been solid.

UPDATE: 5 March 2022: Yoon and Ahn, Together at Last 

I have to return to Busan tomorrow, but as luck would have it, Yoon Seok-yeol and Ahn Cheol-soo chose to make their first joint campaign appearance today in Icheon, about half an hour away from the house on the Han River where I’ve been staying. Due to difficulties finding a parking space, I arrived only minutes before Ahn and Yoon stepped up on stage to great cheering and balloon-shaking. The crowd was smaller than the one at the Moon Jae-in rally I attended in Busan in 2017, but seemed to fill all the space available on the street. (I see the Hankyoreh’s man on the scene had the same impression.)

After Ahn and Yoon walked up and down the runway for an unconvincing display of chumminess, Ahn came back out on his own to call briefly for a change of government. Then it was Yoon’s turn to speak. Urged on perhaps by the icy wind knifing up and down the street, he got straight to the point, assailing the “clique politics” and “protest-movement ideology” of the current administration as if a different Yoon Seok-yeol had done its bidding for two years. The Daejang-dong development scandal, the selective enforcement of the law, and the government’s beholdenness to militant trade unions: all came in for special criticism in a voice surprisingly free of late-campaign hoarseness.

Meanwhile I scanned the masked faces around me. There were a few more young men and women in sight than is usual at conservative events, but not enough, I thought, to justify the Chosun’s hype about Yoon’s popularity with the so-called 2030 demographic. On the other hand those present seemed as confident of their man’s victory on election day as Moon’s followers did at that Busan rally five years ago.

After talking for about twenty minutes Yoon summed things up by calling the election “a battle between the corrupt Lee Jae-myung forces and the great citizens of the Republic of Korea.” Then Ahn came out again, the two men shook hands with people on both sides of the catwalk, Yoon did some of his signature “victory uppercuts,” which went down a storm — and then they were off to the next campaign stop. The crowd didn’t linger either.

As I walked back to my car a silver-haired man coming from the other direction asked if everything was over. I said yes. “Did Ahn Cheol-soo turn up?” he asked, turning and falling into step with me. I affirmed that question too. “He didn’t arrive together with Yoon, did he?” “Different cars, I think.” He pondered this for a moment, then shook his head ruefully, saying, “I wanted to hear what he had to say.” And with that he stepped off the sidewalk and opened the driver’s door of his taxi. So maybe Ahn stands for something after all?

UPDATE: 9 May 2022: Election Day

12 pm: To everyone’s surprise, the turnout so far is over 3% lower than it was in 2017, which is good news for Lee Jae-myung, even if it’s especially low in the nationalist-left stronghold of Jeolla. At this point I don’t see how it can reach the 75% turnout that Yoon has said would be necessary to counter the very high turnout in the early vote, which everyone assumes went for Lee. (Polls had shown that far more of his supporters than of Yoon’s intended to vote early.) Granted, some pundits are pointing to the difference in predictions emanating yesterday from the two camps — the left talking  of winning by 2-3% at most, the right of winning by 10% — as an indication that both parties’ own last-minute (unpublished) polls point to a Yoon victory.  Nevertheless, my impression while going back and forth between the pro-Lee and pro-Yoon broadcasters is that the conservatives are more worried.

9:00 pm: Well, it’s going to be a long night of vote counting, but despite Yoon Seok-yeol’s razor-thin edge in exit polls I don’t much fancy his chances of coming out on top. The glum eyes of the masked people at PPP headquarters also seem to me to indicate foreknowledge of defeat.

Even if Yoon somehow ekes out a victory, there is clearly a disparity between the outcome of the exit polling and the consistent poll finding over the preceding months according to which about 50-53% wanted a change of government. Of course some 2.5% of that group seems to have voted for the Justice Party candidate Sim Sang-jung, the closest thing to a real liberal in the race. Nevertheless, Lee seems to have pulled off much the same sort of feat that Park Geun-hye did in 2012: being of the ruling party while appearing to be somehow not of it at the same time.

Another one or two percent that wanted change yet clearly did not come out for Yoon consisted of those conservatives — represented by well-known pundits like Jeong Gyu-jae, Hwang Jang-su and Byun Hee-jae — who talked all along of either boycotting the election or voting in protest for some fringe candidate, either because they hadn’t forgiven Yoon for his role in Moon’s purge of “accumulated evils,” or because they opposed the semi-parliamentary system he and the PPP appeared to favor. But when a candidate loses by a very small margin, virtually all explanations for his defeat can be considered valid to a certain degree.

10 March 2022, 0:30 am. It’s just after midnight, and now that the early votes are out of the way, Yoon has edged into the lead, to great cheering at PPP headquarters. There is increasing talk that the exit polls may have been quite seriously off, a claim that would seem to be borne out by Yoon’s having apparently received over 10% in Jeolla. But a lot of votes remain to be counted.

02:20 am. KBS has tipped Yoon as the likely winner. The exit polls turned out to have been quite accurate after all.

UPDATE: 10 March: Finally, a Note on US Press Coverage

Anyone who relies wholly on the American media for insight into South Korean politics is likely to be wondering today how such a well-educated people could have rejected, by however small a margin, a candidate as obviously wonderful as Lee Jae-myung. The answer, in a word, is Daejang-dong, the name given here to the land-development scandal that most American journalists seemed averse to discussing at any length.

TIME’s puff piece on the man who “wants to calm his country” was too laughably over the top to be considered representative of anything except TIME. (See its piece on Moon). All too common, however, was this sort of effort to equalize the negative talk about Yoon and Lee:

South Korean media has dubbed the race the “most off-putting election” over the mudslinging between the two candidates. There have been accusations of abuse of power and shady real-estate deals. The wives of both major candidates came under fire over alleged improprieties. Mr. Lee apologized after leaked audio showed him hurling obscenities at his sister-in-law. Mr. Yoon denied associations with a shaman and an anal acupuncturist. (Timothy W. Martin, Wall Street Journal, 7 March 2022.)

The great importance of mudslinging in this election resulted largely from the de-politicization process that has been underway here since Park’s impeachment. But extraordinary things would have to happen for an American journalist to venture into topics like that.

Instead the WSJ’s readers — many of whom might well have had a financial interest in the outcome of the election — were left with only a hazy impression of unpleasantness, of pols being pols. They were to regard the mutual accusations as beneath notice because they cancelled each other out. They weren’t to consider the quite obvious difference between shamanism and anal acupuncture on the one hand, and sexist verbal abuse on the other; nor were they to consider the difference between an apology and a denial.

Note especially: “There have been accusations of abuse of power and shady real-estate deals.” Surely a financial newspaper could have condescended to explain which candidate had been accused of what. After all, one of those deals was Daejang-dong, which Lee Jae-myung organized (by his own proud admission at the time), and one of the men involved described in a secretly recorded conversation as the “theft” of almost 400 million dollars (in our terms). Two other land-development deals in the same province were also made much of in the conservative press. The general public appeared more interested, however, in Lee and his wife’s alleged, systematic abuse of municipal and provincial funds to private ends (see the relevant update above).

Now, Lee and his wife are of course innocent until proven guilty, and Yoon’s wife’s purchase of a favorably priced property from a man mixed up in the Daejang-dong scandal is something I too find hard to set down to mere coincidence. In regard to some of the people Yoon and his wife are rumored to associate with, I hope I don’t need to explain how I feel about “folk-religious” ceremonies that entail the skinning of live cows.

But the fact that the allegations dogging Lee all winter far outnumbered those aimed at Yoon (who had already been under intense and hostile official scrutiny for three years) was something American readers deserved to know before the election. Daejang-dong alone played a much larger role in the political discussion than any of the stuff our press preferred to divert readers with: the backstory about Lee’s impoverished childhood and factory accident, the Korea-as-curiosity-cabinet talk of shamans and anal acupuncture, and the few ideological issues that Americans could grasp without background knowledge of the country (feminism, incels).