With eight months to go until the next presidential election, South Korean voters are beginning to guess what kind of administration will replace the one that has put their country into an unprecedented level of political and social conflicts. Will it be as vindictive in treating the past ruling elite and as ideologically obsessed in pursuing socio-economic goals as was those now in power?

Parties have drawn up charters and platforms in accordance with political ideals they chose, oftentimes hurriedly close to elections. Yet, a sort of democratic tradition had been established in nearly three decades since the departure of the military from national politics late in the 1980s. Since public protests brought Korea’s first female president down four years ago, check and balance between competing power groups have been replaced by a bitter confrontation.

Moon Jae-in, an ex-lawyer who rose to prominence as a deputy to leftist president Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008), disappointed vast majority of Koreans with his risky economic experiments and fruitless approaches to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un after winning presidency with a 41 percent support in a three-way contest in 2017. The pendulum is now clearly back to the right but the opposition slate is currently topped by political novices with sudden popularity.

Former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-yeol declared his decision to run for president Tuesday in his first press meeting at the memorial hall of patriot Yoon Bong-gil in southern Seoul. He had drawn public limelight as the victim of open ostracism by the current power holders who had first used him as the hatchet man to punish past rulers but kicked him out when he began probing members of the new power. At the moment, Moon loyalists are all out to discredit Yoon with exposures of his private matters.

A “Yoon Seok-youl X-file” is now the talk of the town as it concerns supposedly seedy past lives of Yoon’s wife Kim Keon-hee, 49, and her 74-year-old mother. Yoon expressed strong suspicion that the 10-page document, circulating from hand to hand, might have been produced by somebody with official connections as part of a smear campaign against him. He dismissed them as an “inauthentic dossier” and challenged its producer(s) to come out and open the sources of its contents.

YouTubers and internet papers here have a heyday in conveying various versions of the Yoon “X-file” to attract clicks from the curious public, which means money for them. In my own observation, they have mainly consisted of allegations by two former business associates of Yoon’s mother-in-law, who were involved in certain disputes with her and filed charges of fraud, forgery and false accusation against her.

Yoon’s critics are trying to establish that since he married Kim in 2012, the then senior prosecutor exercised his official influence to help his wife and her mother in their arts exhibition and real estate investment businesses. The “X-file” reportedly hinted that Yoon used his position as chief of the Seoul Prosecutors’ Office and later as the head of the entire prosecution organization to protect his wife’s family from criminal proceedings.

Some people in the opposition circles and others in the ruling party opined that the mysterious papers contained so many dishonorable “facts” about the family that Yoon would not be able to sustain his political ambition. On the other hand, there were cautions from within the ruling Democratic Party of Korea that any attempt to take advantage of such circulars in order to cut the popularity of Yoon would be counterproductive because he could pose as a victim of political machinations.

It is still too early to see if the document of unsavory contents will have effects expected by whoever produced them. Yet, there is at least one figure of national prominence who believed that these papers made Yoon look vulnerable as a presidential candidate that requires perfect cleanness in his own public career as well as in his surroundings. Choe Jae-hyeong, who headed the Board of Audit and Inspection from January 2018, quit the office this week and walked into politics, arousing expectations of possible presidential candidacy.

Many welcomed Choe’s emergence for he can be an alternative to Yoon if he loses his political luster because of problems with his family but many others are concerned that the appearance of the No. 1 Mr. Clean in Korean officialdom could eclipse the stature of Yoon Seok-youl and stir the nomination process of the anti-government side. Anyway, it must be enormously embarrassing to President Moon that the highest prosecutor and the top government inspector he named have kicked off campaign simultaneously to wrest power from his party.

But Moon earned it, as Yoon’s popularity and public trust stemmed from his merciless investigation of the new evil spawning in his administration until he lost the president’s favor. Choe similarly was portrayed by the media as a model of public justice as he withstood the president’s attempt at putting the BAI under control and conducted an exhaustive probe into the arbitrary process of phasing out nuclear power plants under direct presidential order.

The entry of Yoon and Choe in the campaign to end the DPK rule encouraged and alerted leaders of the main opposition People Power Party who should now agree upon two things: First, they need to settle the question of merger with the minor opposition People’s Party led by Ahn Cheol-su and, second, they have to work out an equitable formula of nomination process to offer fair chances for the two outsiders.

The ruling party will finalize its presidential nomination by early September, six months before the voting date of March 9 from a long list of aspirants, including the big three, Gyeonggi Province Gov. Lee Jae-myung and former prime ministers Lee Nak-yon and Chung Sye-kyun. President Moon would like to throw his support behind the one who can guarantee his personal security after retirement, but Gov. Lee, the frontrunner, is definitely not the man.

Opposition confidence in an election victory gets ever stronger these days with signs that the younger voters, the perennial left-leaning group, were increasingly turning to the right after four years of disappointment at the new power holders’ moral defects on top of wrong policy priorities. Korea’s opposition party wants to lead the nation into the future with support from all generations, while the electorate is uneasy as they see a couple of jurists untested in the complexities of state affairs being introduced as the most likely pilot.


Kim Myong-sik
Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. -- Ed.