South Korea to vote to overcome the chaos of the Yoon era

SEUL - The Korean Peninsula has been split in two for almost 80 years. Since the end of the Cold War, more than 35 have passed. Yet the prospect of reunification not only remains distant, but the disease of division has festered so deep in Southern society that in these hours, as it elects a new president, the country is more divided than ever: progressives versus conservatives; kids versus adults; men versus women. All this while Seoul, with its thriving intangible industries and chaebol offices, is increasingly a world apart from cities like Ulsan and Busan. After last December's failed self-state coup that cost conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol his impeachment, Democratic Party of Korea (Dpk) candidate Lee Jae-myung arrives at the polls with a clear path to the presidency. Partly on the back of last December's street protests; partly because the conservatives of the Power People Party (PPP) have elevated self-sabotage to an art form, presenting themselves with a weak candidate, Kim Moon-soo, chosen after a selection process that revealed the splits within the party and its ruling class' contempt for internal democracy.

A problem,' explains Wooyeal Paik, a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at Yonsei University, 'exacerbated by the fact that Korean politics is no longer an 'ideological polarisation' but a 'devotional one'. The personalisation of rivalries prompts people to look at - and judge - their opponents in increasingly ethical and moral, rather than political, terms. An approach that domestically translates into the increasingly frequent recourse to impeachment procedures (2004, 2016, 2025), in a growing tension between electoral legitimacy and accountability; between the strength of political institutions and the weakness of the norms of coexistence between parties. "Every time a president finishes his term in office, it is automatic that he is investigated, arrested, pilloried," explains Guido Alberto Casanova, junior research fellow at Ispi's Asia Centre. "The result is that for politicians the stakes are so high, not least on a personal level, that in order to defeat the adversary everything becomes licit".

In the latest Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Seoul lost 10 places, slipping to 32nd place and not even reaching a sufficiency in 'political culture'. A sign, according to Paik, that in a young democracy "in which authoritarian instincts, especially on the right, have not yet been completely extinguished" the battle to remove Yoon has exacerbated a polarisation that had been growing for years. In foreign policy, a subject that is for obvious reasons of existential importance in South Korea, things are no better. Here, partisanship has resulted in serious accusations such as treason and unpatriotism, not infrequently peppered with expressions such as 'pro-North Korean forces', 'anti-state elements', 'pro-Japanese collaborationism'.The other snags in Korean society do not seem any easier to mend.

This year, for the first time since 2007, there are no women among the six presidential candidates. Not only that. The Reform Party, which under the unscrupulous leadership of Lee Jun-seok aspires to become the third largest party after the Dpk and the Ppp, owes much of its popularity to having catalysed the frustrations of many young men who - despite the widest gender pay gap of all the OECD countries: 29.3% - feel discriminated against compared to women. Blame in part the 18 months of compulsory conscription and in part the importance attributed by families to academic success, a terrain on which girls dominate.A division made more acute by the generational one. 'Until 10-20 years ago,' Paik explains, 'finding a good job after graduation was easy. Not any more today. Three quarters of the boys choose to go to university and when they leave they have high expectations. They have studied a lot and in a hyper-competitive system. They don't want to know about working in a factory or a shipyard'. A picture that for those who live far from Seoul is even bleaker. 'Talking to young people coming out of provincial universities,' explains Byong Jin Ahn, a professor at the Global Academy for Future Civilisation at Kyung Hee University, 'is discouraging. They are dissatisfied, they feel they have no future, and they don't get married'. It is no coincidence that South Korea, where the correlation between births and marriages remains very strong, has the lowest fertility rate on the planet. Another challenge for the man who, starting tomorrow, will have to restore lustre to one of the greatest success stories of the Asian century.