The election campaign to select the new leader of the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy is heating up as the Feb. 8 voting day draws closer.
But the campaign is gaining little public attention because, as expected, it is simply turning into a battle that worsens the party’s deep-rooted factional strife, rather than providing a stage on which the contestants present visions for the country’s largest opposition group.
Both leading candidates ― Moon Jae-in and Park Jie-won, who represent the party’s two major factions ― seem more focused on finding faults with each other than offering policies, ideas and visions on how they would change the party, which has so many problems that it lost all recent major elections, even when the ruling party was struggling with the Sewol ferry disaster, continuing economic problems and President Park Geun-hye’s personnel fiascos.
Without sounding alarmist, the way the election campaign is unfolding strongly suggests that no matter who secures the new leadership post, the NPAD is unlikely to restore public confidence. This is unfortunate, not only for the opposition but also the entire nation.
We know from experience that a weak, incapable and unpopular opposition allows even an unpopular president and ruling party to behave in a self-righteous manner in disregard of popular sentiment.
Lately, we witnessed one such example in President Park Geun-hye’s New Year’s news conference, in which she did little more than publicly defend her close aides and express unlimited confidence in them, though even ruling party members urged to sack some of them.
What Park said about the Blue House aides in the news conference ran counter to the prevailing public sentiment, and thus the news conference was a public relations disaster. Even conservative media that usually side with her joined the fray to lambaste her.
This undoubtedly put Moon Hee-sang, the interim NPAD leader, in a good position when he held his New Year’s news conference the following day. A moderate performance would have drawn a stronger positive response from the public, who had been frustrated by the president’s obstinacy the previous day.
There are a lot of big issues that politicians should tackle this year, and many expected Moon to address concerns such as the reform of the pension plans for government workers ― for which the party has yet to draw up its own proposal ― or the problems of the part-time and temporary workers.
But Moon devoted the news conference ― which, being the first in the New Year, is supposed to deal with major state affairs ― to criticizing Park for what she said the previous day. It is simply ridiculous that Moon criticized Park’s news conference for lacking “substance,” when his own press meeting contained not one scrap of it.
The Institute for Democracy and Policies, the NPAD’s think tank, suggested in a report last November that the party should implement politics putting first priority on the people, “regardless of what President Park does.” It also called on the party to provide “alternatives and solutions,” instead of only picking out problems and making loud protests.
The ongoing election campaign to elect its new leader, and Moon’s news conference showed the party is going in exactly the opposite direction. There is no future for a party that lives on criticism for the sake of criticism and opposition for the sake of opposition.
