Ruling party’s internal feud

Chung Jin-suk, the floor leader of the ruling Saenuri Party, and Hyun Ki-hwan, senior secretary to President Park Geun-hye for political affairs, are said to have encountered on the same KTX train on Wednesday on their way to Gwangju to attend a ceremony marking the 1980 pro-democracy movement in Gwangju but did not talk to each other. It is a symbolic scene that shows how the current relationship between the president and the ruling party following a failure to form the party’s new leadership.

A Saenuri faction loyal to the president and its rival faction on Tuesday sparred over the failure to hold a national committee meeting to approve a new leadership. The Park loyalists blamed Chung for forming new decision-making committees mainly with non-Park loyalists, demanding him to offer a public apology or resign. The non-Park faction put all the blames on the Park loyalists, refusing to change the members of the panels. It is worrisome that the two factions will remain in the same party despite such tremendous differences, let alone reform the party.

The political landscape formed by the parliamentary majority that the electorate gave to opposition parties in the April 13 elections require President Park and her party to take a whole new political attitude. The president-party relationship cannot be that of a master and servants. As Saenuri lawmaker Kim Sung-tae said, if the leadership of the ruling party’s decision-making committees should step down because the president did not approve them, what is the difference from the president’s previous behavior of forcing a former Saenuri floor leader to resign because he did not agree with the president on major issues?

Still, the non-loyalists cannot succeed in their attempt to take the party’s leadership as long as they act as if they were trying to take over the party. Although the latest feud has revealed the arrogance of the Park loyalists who have yet to come to their senses despite the crushing defeat in the parliamentary elections, it also shows that the non-loyalists cannot reform the party without cooperating with the loyalists. After all, if the Saenuri Party wants to avoid a split, the side with greater responsibilities should perform self-reflections and make concessions. Judging from the current behavior of the loyalists, it is hard to expect the faction to do so.

Just as the people do not want the main opposition party to go back to its old days of pro-democracy activists, neither do they want the ruling party to go back to its old days as a party of Park loyalists. Ahn Chul-soo, co-chairman of the minor opposition People’s Party, told a group of journalists in Gwangju that he had no plan to form a coalition government with the Saenuri Party but added that his party would accept those who bolt out of the ruling party. If the Saenuri Party fails to remain united and reform itself, it could end up being forced to accept a political realignment.