[Editorial] Chuseok for lawmakers

Prices have gone up. Jobs are hard to find. It is not easy to rent a home at a reasonable price. But these and other concerns of ordinary people are put to rest for a while, as the four-day Chuseok holiday has just started.

For tens of millions of people joining the annual holiday migration, Chuseok will be not only an occasion for ancestral worship and family reunions but an opportunity to take a break, rest, relax and feast. For them, “it should be just like Chuseok, no more or no less,” as the old saying goes.

But not all people are enjoying the festivities. Among those who are certain to have sleepless nights during the holiday season are lawmakers going back to their constituencies.

For many of them, Chuseok used to be an auspicious occasion to backslap and schmooze with elated voters. But not this time, if the so-called “Ahn Cheol-soo phenomenon” is any indication of an upsurge in the electorate’s distrust in politicians.

People are turning a cold shoulder to politics, political parties and politicians in their current form. They demand a drastic change. As a senior lawmaker affiliated with the ruling Grand National Party put it, what is terrifying to the political community is not professor Ahn of Seoul National University himself, but the shift in voter attitude he symbolizes.

Ahn gained popularity as a wunderkind when he abandoned his training as a medical doctor and launched a software startup, AhnLab, more than 15 years ago. After resigning as the chief executive officer of the computer-security company in 2005, he turned himself into a university professor and preached convergence in science and technology.

But he dropped a bombshell when he said a week ago that he was considering running in the upcoming Seoul mayoral race as an independent. It did not take long before opinion polls put him well ahead of frontrunners for nomination in the ruling and main opposition parties. His approval rating was at 50 percent.

He stunned both the political community and the electorate again on Tuesday, this time announcing he would not run in the race but instead support Park Won-soon, a lawyer-cum-social activist whose approval rating was at a mere 5 percent. The question at the time was whether or not Ahn’s move would boost the approval rating of Park, who is not affiliated with any political party, either.

To the disappointment of naysayers who had brushed the Ahn phenomenon aside as a passing aberration, Park’s approval rating soared. In an opinion poll conducted by a conservative daily, the Chosun Ilbo, more than 51 percent of the respondents said they would support him in a race against the ruling party’s frontrunner. Seven in 10 respondents said they would vote for Park, should he run as a candidate representing all opposition forces.

The diehard Ahn phenomenon is also posing a threat to Rep. Park Geun-hye, a former chairwoman of the Grand National Party, who has until recently topped the opinion poll rankings of potential presidential candidates by big margins. However, the Chosun Ilbo survey found Ahn leads Park in voter support, though within the margin of error. No wonder there is much talk about Ahn running in the presidential election in December next year, though he denies such a possibility.

The electorate’s deepening distrust is not limited to Seoul mayoral and presidential hopefuls of the ruling and opposition parties. It is extended to their lawmakers as well, as evidenced by another survey.

According to the survey conducted by the Munhwa Ilbo daily last Sunday, only 27 percent of the respondents said they would vote for the incumbent lawmakers while 54.9 percent demanded they be replaced by new faces in the April parliamentary elections. The remainder were undecided.

As such, a less welcome, if not frigid, response from the electorate should not come as a surprise to lawmakers going back to their electoral districts. Instead, they will do well to prepare themselves for a rude awakening to the fact that their reelection is at stake. They will have to ponder how to control the damage.