[The Editors' Verdict] What Is the Purpose of District Parties?

Nothing More Than a Deterioration Fueling System Malfunction

The party system reform proposal put forward 12 years ago by six then-Hannara Party reformist lawmakers?Nam Kyung-pil, Jung Doo-un, Koo Sang-chan, Kwon Young-jin, Kim Yong-tae, and Hong Il-pyo?still holds considerable significance today. In their reform plan, they advocated for ▲abolishing the central party ▲abolishing the party leader position ▲abolishing the nomination system ▲introducing a complete national primary system ▲eliminating mandatory party lines. In summary, the idea was to adopt an American-style parliamentary party model and, further, to properly operate a presidential system.

The proposal faltered under the harsh crackdown of Park Geun-hye’s emergency committee and echoed faintly, but it was clearly a rare, concrete, institutional, and well-organized suggestion in the political sphere. When combined with former President Roh Moo-hyun’s one-point constitutional amendment proposal during his tenure?advocating for a four-year presidential term with re-election and unifying the terms of the president and National Assembly members?it would have brought the system closer to the original form of a presidential system, but this too was shelved. Since then, some voices raised have been worth listening to, but most were fragmented and abstract, as far as I recall.

Our power structure and party system are more like oddly recombined imitations or defective products. In a typical presidential system, there is virtually no central party that supersedes the parliamentary group, and the party leader is merely the floor leader representing the lawmakers, with no concept of nominations. Therefore, party cohesion loosens, and individual lawmakers enjoy greater autonomy, making it easier for opposing voting blocs to form within both the ruling and opposition parties, i.e., an intersection group between the two. This point is the space for compromise where nothing is absolutely impossible or easily granted.

The power structure and party system of a typical European-style parliamentary system are largely the opposite in most details, and our party system, swayed by nomination rights and the power of the central party, is much closer to this side if anything. Each system is designed to bring out its own strengths and features, so it is not a matter of right or wrong, but mixing them disorderly certainly carries a high risk of malfunction.

Image source = Yonhap News Agency

Therefore, it is accurate to say that our system is unfortunately not a presidential system but a strange system unique to us, where only the role of the president exists, and the operating principles of a parliamentary system are tangled recklessly. The reform and constitutional amendment proposals mentioned earlier aimed precisely to correct this problem.

The president is trapped in a term of five years, which is neither here nor there, and one to two years of this term are inevitably ineffective in practice. Maintaining a parliamentary seat, which is already extremely attractive as a profession due to its enormous privileges, is the top priority, and the official nomination process is fixed. Since speaking frankly or compromising does not help here, there is no hesitation in absurd behavior, immoral and regressive, and in making decisions in a disciplined manner.

As a result, political betrayal of citizens and voters is systematized, and deadlock in politics, where the system becomes entirely useless, becomes chronic. The political chaos we witness today, which has degraded to the level of the ‘Squid Game,’ is a simultaneous and continuous screening of the farce born from this distorted system.

The sudden revival theory of district parties brought up by former People Power Party emergency committee chairman Han Dong-hoon and Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung is ominous and regrettable in this regard. The district party, which controls the central party and grips the nomination rights, centered on the party leader (and sometimes the president), is a byproduct or kindling of one-pole politics that suppresses theory and enforces a single-line political formation, leaving little room for opposition that it is a deterioration. Needless to say, the ghosts of old practices and money politics rampant around district parties remain. Therefore, their claims are either evidence of very poor understanding and interest in the system or likely the result of ulterior motives.