Progressive politics has lost its way. So said Kang Ki-kab, the chairman of the embattled United Progressive Party, summing up the situation his left-wing party has got itself into by failing to expel two controversial lawmakers.
Kang and his reformist group were thrown into a panic on Thursday when the 13 lawmakers of the minor opposition party unexpectedly voted down a motion to kick out Reps. Lee Seok-ki and Kim Jae-yeon, the main culprits of the party’s abysmal downfall.
The 13 legislators consisted of five reformists, two neutralists and six from the allegedly pro-North Korea faction called the National Liberation. Both of the two neutralists expressed support for the motion on the two legislators. But one of them, Rep. Kim Je-nam, changed her mind at the last moment.
Kang sought to ostracize the two legislators because without removing them, he could not recover the party’s tarnished image and restore public confidence.
The two lawmakers triggered bitter factional strife by refusing to give up their ill-gotten parliamentary seats. They ignored the finding that they became the party’s proportional representation candidates for the April general election through a massively rigged primary.
They also made the UPP a target of ridicule and criticism by making nonsensical and anachronistic pro-Pyongyang comments.
Furthermore, their faction sparked public outrage by using violence against the party’s leaders to prevent them from invalidating the outcome of the primary and disciplining those involved in the rigging. They never apologized for their blatantly undemocratic behavior.
Kang had thus every reason to boot the two legislators out of the party. Yet the unexpected vote outcome threw his efforts of the past three months down the drain.
The Thursday vote demonstrated that the party was still under the grip of the NL faction and that as long as the pro-Pyongyang group wields control, the party was hopeless and irredeemable.
Kang and other reform-minded leaders of the party are facing a moment of reckoning. Spooked by the Thursday vote, they appear to have lost some self assurance. But they need to think hard about their next course of action.
One option is to defect from the UPP and set up a new progressive party. According to news reports, on Friday alone, more than 1,100 rank-and-file UPP members informed the party of their decision to quit.
For the past couple of months, reform-minded UPP members patiently waited for the party’s new leadership to oust the two legislators and pave the way for an overhaul. However, now that evicting the two has become impossible, they gave up their tenuous hopes and decided to quit the party themselves.
But for the party’s reformist leaders, defecting is easier said than done. They face various constraints, not least the fact that lawmakers elected through proportional representation lose their parliamentary seats when they defect from their parties.
Some party members called for the dissolution of the party. In a statement, they proposed that likeminded members hang together to submit a petition to the government to dismantle the UPP. The Constitution empowers the government to take a political party to the Constitutional Court for its dissolution if its purposes or activities run counter to the fundamental democratic order.
The dissolution of the UPP sounds like a good idea, given that the party has proven to be unable to purify itself by cutting off the rotten segments.
Yet the problem is the government has never brought an action against a political party in the Constitutional Court. Given its political implications, it would not be easy for the government to take such action.
While the party’s reformist leaders grope for ways to overcome the crisis in progressive politics, the ruling Saenuri Party and the main opposition Democratic United Party need to start the process to deprive the two UPP lawmakers of their parliamentary seats.
A month ago, the two parties agreed to refer the two to the Assembly’s Ethics Committee for examination of their qualifications as lawmakers.
Under the current National Assembly Act, a lawmaker can be disqualified by a vote of not less than two thirds of all the National Assembly members. As the combined seats of the two parties easily exceed this requirement, they can divest the two UPP lawmakers of their Assembly membership if they decide to do so.
