The ruling Uri Party chairman Lee Bu Young and the whole of the party's central standing committee resigned en masses on Monday. That leadership team had been in place since a direct representative election at the party convention of January 2004, and steps down without completing a full year. Their resignations were in some ways inevitable when you think of how the party failed to pass the four major reform bills and answer to the people's call for reform.
The vacuum the move creates, however, should not be allowed to last too long. The government has made the economy as it relates to the people's welfare and by extension improving the lives of the people its goal for 2005, and that is what many in the country want to see. Uri says it will form an emergency committee to run the party until the April convention, but it will have to minimize the time it operates without leadership so as to prevent the people from having to worry about politics.
Since the resignations came at the urging of party hardliners it is possible there might be a struggle over party platform during the vacancy in formal leadership. He criticized party hardliners for their "commercialized radicalism" and said members should be prepared for a bold fight with the hardliners' platform. He said also that the party's policies should be chosen through dialogue and compromise instead of conflict and confrontation, and he is right. "Hardline" and "moderate" are extremely situational and relative concepts, however, and the standard should be how true a position is to the principles of democracy and civil rights. For example, abolishing the National Security Law (NSL) conforms to those principles, and amending it is just unprincipled compromise.
It is exceedingly natural to have diverse opinions expressed in the course of debate in a democratic political party. In the ruling Uri Party, however, positions conflicted and were overturned even after they had been formally decided through debate. Party leadership's wavering was largely responsible for the way the ruling party failed to provide a sense of stability. The failure to establish a format for making decisions and some game rules over the 8 months since National Assembly elections is the fault of both hardliners and moderates within the party. It is time to get party leadership in order and foster an identity true to the principles and then engage in reform.
The Hankyoreh, 4 January 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]
[Editorial] Being True to Reform is the Answer |
