The rise and fall of Park Geun-hye: the perils of South Korea’s weak party system

Abstract

The political turmoil prompted by the corruption scandal surrounding president Park Geun-hye and her confidante, Choi Soon-sil, convulsed South Korea in the winter of 2016/17. Park’s response was not only ineffective, but inflammatory. Intense public frustration, together with mounting circumstantial evidence, led to an impeachment process. Thus Park became the first democratically elected president to be removed. Political corruption is not new in South Korea. Yet, no previous case matches the magnitude of the Park debacle and no former president has had to sacrifice their term in office. This raises a key question: what is it that made this scandal so different? This article argues that the debate has so far paid insufficient attention to the role of the South Korean political system in explaining Park’s impeachment. The government party was the largest in the National Assembly and thus able to stop the impeachment process, but failed to do so. The article unpacks the political unrest of 2016/17 by analysing South Korean party politics, focussing specifically on the electoral structure that had been established in the post-1987 democratic era and the subsequent changes that conditioned and facilitated the political downfall of Park Geun-hye.

Keywords:

• Park Geun-hye
• impeachment
• factionalism
• regionalism
• South Korea
• electoral system

Notes

1 In this paper, the government party is ‘the ruling party’. The Saenuri Party lost the 2016 general election, securing only 122 seats. The party later co-opted independents to become the largest party, with 129 seats at the time of the impeachment proceedings.

2 South Korea’s National Assembly has a four-year term in a unicameral system without term limits, but the president sits for a single five-year term. Hence, the system is ‘unsynchronised’.

3 Park had already changed the constitution in 1969, extending the presidential term limit from two to three to enable him to enter the race again.

4 The Kyongsang province is divided into North and South. TK is the acronym of Taegu (a metropolitan city in the north, now ‘Daegu’) and Kyongsang; PK is the acronym of Pusan (a corresponding city in the south, now ‘Busan’) and Kyongsang.

5 It was revealed, only a few months before the general election, that the GNP had benefitted from chaebol slush funds during the 2002 presidential campaign. Illegal trade-offs between the parties and chaebols were nothing new, but the scale and the methods shocked the nation. A truck loaded with cash boxes was delivered to the party at a service station. This led to the GNP’s new nickname, the ‘trucking party’.

6 In the South Korean context, this term refers to reforming the chaebols.

7 The sole exception was the election for senior local education positions where, perhaps influenced by the Seowol incident, the trend was bucked: of seventeen positions, only four went to conservative candidates, down from 10. This represented a landslide victory for progressive and centre-left candidates.

8 Two had been appointed by Park and two by the Chief Justice, himself a Park appointee, meaning that four of the judges were directly or indirectly appointed by her government. In addition, two other judges had been appointed by the previous Lee government. The remainder were appointed by the National Assembly, where the conservatives were in the majority.

9 According to the Constitutional Court Act of 1988, the court must make a final decision within 180 days of receipt of an impeachment motion. A minimum of seven judges must be present and six must vote in favour. As mentioned, the Constitutional Court consists of nine judges. Yet, the chair had completed his six year-term in January 2017, i.e. during the hearing, so that the impeachment decision was made by eight judges.

10 Many criticised the Park government for gradually eroding civil liberties. Notably, Kim Ki-choon, a former Park chief of staff, was arrested on charges of compiling an alleged blacklist of artists known to be critical of the government. The relationship between Kim and Park goes back to Park’s father’s period. During the senior Park’s period, Kim led a branch of the spy agency tasked with rooting out alleged communists. He is also known to have drafted the 1972 constitution which facilitated Park Chung-hee’s life-time presidential tenure.