Tight race for South Korean presidency

HONG KONG: The South Korean presidential election has already been a cliff-hanger which has had one definite result: the next three weeks will also be a cliff-hanger before voting finally takes place on December 19th.
The first cliff-hanger took place because President Kim Dae Jung has disappointingly had no time for trying to perfect South Korea''s questionable democratic structure. South Korea has not copied Indonesia and initiated a run-off election, which would ensure that whoever wins is not a minority president.
South Korea has also yet to copy every other nation with a presidential system, and instituted a vice-presidency into the constitutional set-up.
The first failure is understandable. If there had been a run-off election, Kim Dae Jung might never have become president in the first place. He won the presidency at his fourth attempt in 1997 when the conservative forces were split between two candidates.
This year the conservative side has learnt from that mistake, and its vote will solidly line-up behind the Grand National Party (GNP) candidate Lee Hoi Chang. Instead, it has looked as if the reformist forces would be split.
First in the field was the candidate of the Millennium Democratic Party, human rights lawyer Roh Moo Hyun. At the beginning of this year Roh emerged from the MDP''s primary voting appearing to be a strong candidate capable of defeating Lee. But Roh quickly faded and has been running well behind Lee in public opinion polls.
This encouraged another candidate, Chung Moon Joon, to found his own party, National Alliance 21, and to enter the field. Chung''s tragedy was that the presidential election was not held immediately after the soccer World Cup took place in South Korea and Japan.
Chung is president of the South Korean Football Association and so shared the masses adoration with coach Guus Hiddink when the South Korean team shocked the soccer world by finishing in fourth place. Had the election been held then, he would almost certainly have become President.
But the glory of that moment has faded and Chung''s candidacy along with it. Chung has also been running well behind Lee in the opinion polls. In the absence of a run-off election and with neither Chung nor Roh willing to withdraw from the race it began to look like a shoo-in for Lee. A recent poll had him winning 41.1 per cent of the vote, with 27.9 percent for Chung and 23.9 per cent for Roh.
But that was before the first cliff-hanger got underway, as Chung and Roh tried to agree on a single reformist candidate in the December 19th poll. The difficulty lay in finding a mutually acceptable way of deciding who should withdraw.
In the middle of last week it looked as if the negotiations had finally broken down. The Lee camp was breathing a sigh of relief. But the two candidates persisted and finally produced a complex way of deciding who should proceed. First there was a two-hour televised debate between the two reformist candidates.
Then a special public opinion survey was taken with supporters of Lee carefully screened out. Roh won the support of 48.6 per cent, Chung 42.2 per cent. So Chung has withdrawn from the race saying that he will do his best to see that Roh wins. If they stick by an earlier agreement Chung will now become Roh''s campaign manager.
The Korean electorate, used to seeing politicians fighting each other to the death (as former oppositionists Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung did) has rewarded Roh with a surge in the polls which momentarily puts him ahead of Lee.
But with North Korea verbally attacking Lee almost daily, and with two sons of the MDP''s founder President Kim Dae Jung having been jailed for corruption, Roh cannot take his slight lead for granted.
But with the South Korean electorate faced for the first time with a clear choice between candidates representing left and right, pro-worker and pro-business, the only certainty is that another cliff-hanger lies ahead.