Han visits ex-President Park to woo conservative voters

DAEGU -- Leaders of the ruling People Power Party on Tuesday visited the home of former President Park Geun-hye in Daegu, in an apparent move to woo conservative voters amid polls that hit worrying lows in the past week.

“She spoke about affairs and issues affecting the country, and I have thanked her for her warm words of support,” Han Dong-hoon, the interim chief of the People Power Party, told reporters following his meeting with the former president.

Park was impeached and removed from office in 2017 on corruption charges. She was later sentenced to 25 years in prison but was pardoned by her successor, former President Moon Jae-in, in 2021.

Park, the daughter of former President Park Chung-hee who was in office during South Korea’s rocky industrialization period, is a symbolic figure for the country’s conservatives who are still nostalgic for her father and his legacy.

Han, the political novice, has yet to gain the full endorsement of conservative voters who remember him as the prosecutor who led the investigation into then-President Park and asked the court to sentence her to 30 years in jail. In photographs of the meeting released by the party the same day, Park and Han appear to be all smiles.

Han said the meeting lasted about 30 minutes and was attended by himself and the party’s floor leader, Rep. Yun Jae-ok, and Park’s lawyer Yoo Yeong-ha, who is running as a candidate for the party in the National Assembly in a district in Daegu.

Yoo told reporters that Park stressed conservative party unity, referring in particular to President Yoon Suk Yeol and his relationship with Han. He added the former president touched on the nationwide doctors’ strike that has been going on for the past month but refrained from going into details.

Political observers have been watching for possible friction between Yoon and the People Power Party leader as controversies concerning presidential officials and Cabinet members were cited as likely reasons behind the ruling party’s faltering ratings.

According to a March 21-22 Realmeter survey of 14,000 voters aged 18 and older, support for the People Power Party fell behind the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea, 37.1 percent to 42.8 percent. The survey’s sampling error margin was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.

Up until early March, the People Power Party had been maintaining a steady lead over the Democratic Party.

That changed after news that Lee Jong-sup, Yoon’s former defense minister who stepped down following the on-duty death of a marine in July last year, left the country to serve as envoy to Australia while he was still under investigation. The presidential office came under fire for appointing the former minister despite his status as a suspect in an ongoing investigation.

Now the ruling party is suddenly faced with its worst-case scenarios, with Rep. Hong Suk-joon on the party’s election steering committee predicting as few as 80-something seats to be picked up by the party based on the latest polls. That is far below the threshold for a National Assembly majority, which is 151 seats.

The People Power Party leadership’s Tuesday trip to Daegu, dubbed the “heart of South Korean conservatism,” comes four days since the party last campaigned there. “This election depends on Daegu,” Han said in a speech given to supporters in the city on Friday.

In Busan, a traditional stronghold for the conservative party until recently, the ruling party was winning in just two to three out of the total eight districts, polls from last week showed.

After he met with Park, Han stopped by Busan to rally support for his party's candidates.

“Things are not looking good here,” one People Power Party candidate running in Busan told The Korea Herald. “There’s still time left until the election. Hopefully, things will get better.”

The general election to choose members of the National Assembly is on April 10. Early voting takes place in 10 days.