For the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy, 2015 will be a year that will decide its fate.
Having faced one crisis after another since the 2012 presidential election, the NPAD was left in a state one party official described as “screwed,” with falling ratings and worsening internal strife topped off by a lack of leadership.
As 2014 drew to an end, NPAD supporters were hoping the party convention in February would be the political panacea they had been waiting for.
NPAD members at the convention will select a new leader who will steer the party through the 2016 general election, and prepare it for the 2017 presidential election, making this a high-stakes convention.
Reps. Moon Jae-in, Park Jie-won, and three others are in the race for the party chairmanship, while more are vying for seats on the party’s supreme council.
But the focus is on who will become the party leader, as the new chair will have to tackle the party’s long-running problem: factional strife between the party’s powerful pro-Roh Moo-hyun group, which claims to have inherited the late liberal president’s legacy, and the rest.
The simmering strife between the two factions has boiled over twice in 2014, causing the party to forfeit all legislative affairs both times and thereby paralyzing lawmaking activities at the National Assembly, which hurt their ratings in the polls.
In 2014, the NPAD’s ratings never breached the 30 percent-mark in Gallup Korea surveys. December’s rating stood at 22 percent. Realmeter, another local pollster, measured the main opposition’s approval numbers at 22.7 percent in the same month.
The strife has also led to the toppling of three chairs, as opposing factions pressured the leaders to resign after disappointing results in the July by-elections and prolonged negotiations with the governing Saenuri Party over the special Sewol bill.
But the convention itself is a factional fight, as it pits Moon, the leader of the pro-Roh faction against Park, the leader of the opposing faction. Such a matchup could worsen internal strife or at best, distract attention from it, experts said.
“Moon is taking up his role as a big brother for the pro-Rohs,” Chung-Ang University professor Choi Young-jin said. “He’s likely going to make the playing field for the pro-Rohs easier in the 2016 general election after he becomes party chair.”
Moon has vowed to end factionalism for the party’s sake if he becomes chair.
That promise will be all the more important for the South Korean left according to another expert.
“2017 will be a good opportunity for the (NPAD) to defeat the conservative party in the presidential election,” said Yoon Pyung-joong, a professor at Hanshin University.
“The public is likely to be jaded with the two consecutive conservative administrations,” Yoon said, citing the recent scandals in the Park Geun-hye administration and the preceding Lee Myung-bak administration.
The NPAD will have about 34 months from the convention until the next presidential election to raise its public standing.
By Jeong Hunny (hj257@heraldcorp.com)
