The South Korean election: Why the left lost

In South Korea’s election this week, the conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol, of the People Power Party, defeated progressive Lee Jae-myung by just 0.73%.

Less reported in the international press is the fact that an alternative left-wing candidate, Sim Sang-jung, also ran. She received 2.33% of the vote, which almost certainly would have gone to Lee, of the ruling Democratic Party, had she not run. Sim “threw” the election to Yoon, as her votes would have given Lee a clear victory margin.

South Korean presidential elections reward the candidate with the most votes. This plurality requirement strongly encourages all voters on the right and left to converge around one unity candidate for each side. Small-party candidates can pull away votes from an ideologically similar, large-party candidate who might otherwise win.

This is precisely what happened. The votes of the combined South Korean left were a winning majority. But divided across two parties — even one which was very small — neither had enough to win.

By contrast, there was also an alternative conservative candidate, Ahn Chul-soon. Like Sim, his polling was very low and he had no chance to win. But unlike Sim, he withdrew and threw his support behind Yoon. Even though Ahn only polled around 5%, that extra 5% put Yoon over the top.

This is an ironic outcome because South Korea’s conservatives are widely thought to be bereft of good ideas, especially on domestic policy. The core of the right’s appeal is foreign policy.

South Korean conservatives seek a tougher line on North Korea and China, a closer alignment with the U.S. and “future-oriented” engagement with Japan. While Japan may appreciate Yoon’s victory, foreign policy is usually not a winning campaign strategy. Voters in democracies overwhelmingly make their decisions based on domestic, even local, politics.

And on those issues, the South Korean left has a clear advantage. It speaks to widespread social anxiety about spiraling education and housing costs, insufficient child care support, the environment, social inclusion for minorities, poor job opportunities, punishing education burdens for the young and so on. This package of issues is colloquially known as Hell Chosun, and the right has almost nothing to say about it.

Indeed, there is palpable dread on the left over Yoon’s victory. To his opponents, he looks like South Korea’s “Korea, Inc.” past of long working hours, cultural conservatism and little interest in social inclusion or openness. Unsurprisingly, young women tilted against Yoon.

Yet the right’s victory was likely because the South Korean left was elected on these social issues in the last presidential election but did little about them.

Current South Korean President Moon Jae-in campaigned on domestic policy but governed on foreign policy. His dovish detente effort toward North Korea completely dominated his presidency. It was also deeply controversial — South Korean conservatives bitterly opposed it — and failed.

For all the hype of the last few years about the summits between Moon, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and former U.S. President Donald Trump, nothing came of it all.

The Korean stalemate is unchanged despite five years of Moon’s effort. Worse, that effort alienated the Americans — and the U.S. alliance is very popular in South Korea. Moon consistently sought to side-step United Nations sanctions on North Korea, to which South Korea is legally bound as a member of the U.N.

Moon also clearly manipulated Trump’s callowness and vanity. Moon fed Trump a story about winning a Nobel Prize if he met Kim. It was an open secret in South Korea that this was a ruse to get Trump to meet Kim. But to the U.S. foreign policy community, this trick smacked of manipulation, and when Joe Biden became president, he conspicuously avoided engaging Moon.

In short, centrist votes likely saw the current progressive administration forego the domestic goals on which it campaigned in order to pursue a controversial foreign policy that alienated South Korea’s core ally. And indeed, Yoon campaigned aggressively on restoring the U.S. alliance.

Foreign policy, which traditionally disinterests voters, became the primary divide between Yoon and Lee. Lee promised more of Moon’s controversial policy, which had not returned much beyond a strained U.S. alliance, while Yoon promised to restore that crucial relationship.

What should have been an easy ideological election for the left — fought on social welfare issues it cares about deeply — was lost, because the current leftist administration gave up those goals for a quixotic, divisive quest for a final deal with Pyongyang.

Yoon then will likely change South Korean foreign policy. Relations with Japan will improve slightly and with the Americans substantially. But most of the quality-of-life issues where South Korea desperately needs change will likely go unaddressed. Worse, the sharp cleavages in South Korean society, which the election revealed in a victory margin of less than 1%, will go unabated.

South Korea has an “imperial presidency” — a presidential office which overawes the legislature and the courts. This incentives a sharp right-left competition for this superposition, and that zero-sum competition in turn feeds South Korean polarization.

The South Korean media has been calling for Yoon to govern consensually in recognition of his narrow victory margin. But he likely will not. His predecessors did not either.

Moon’s North Korea outreach deeply alienated the South Korea right, but Moon used the wide powers of the imperial presidency to just ignore conservatives and push on with his controversial detente anyway. Yoon will likely ignore the left in the same way.

The ideal outcome of this polarized electorate and divisive, thrown election would be a tempered, constrained executive and an empowered, more mature legislature to soften South Korea’s sharp social cleavages. But that is unlikely.

Robert Kelly is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Pusan National University in South Korea. Follow his work on his website or at Twitter.