With the campaigns for Wednesday’s general election in the final stretch, voters should think about decisions they have already made or will make. Here are some of the points we suggest voters ponder over before they go to the polling stations.
First, the quadrennial election should serve as a verdict on the administration of President Park Geun-hye. Her five-year single term of office has already passed its midway point, but an election like this is usually regarded as a sort of midterm evaluation of an administration. Voters should grade what the Park presidency has done.
The first criteria of course should be whether your life is better off than before Park moved into the Blue House with a promise to open a “happy era” for all Koreans. Most of all, how you feel about the economy should be a major factor in deciding whether to vote for the ruling party candidate or not.
The second point in the checklist — which is no less important than the economy — should be Park’s foreign policy. The election comes at a time when the administration is facing the most formidable challenges in recent years over North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats.
It is obvious that the rogue regime led by an unpredictable 33-year-old dictator is to primarily blame for the current crisis. But that does not mean that Park had little to do with the current situation on the peninsula. Voters should make a judgement on the way the Park administration had dealt with North Korea and how it is coping with the latest threats from the North’s weapons of mass destruction.
The scorecard on the Park presidency and her ruling party should also include an assessment of her domestic policies — like those on its professed reform of the labor market and three other major sectors and the decision to publish state-authored Korean history textbooks for middle and high school students. Also to be considered is the internal power struggle between those loyal to Park and the minority faction.
The upcoming election, which will elect 300 lawmakers, including 47 under proportional representation, should hand out a verdict on the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea as well.
Did the party properly check the government and the ruling party? Did it behave as a responsible opposition or as only a disrupter of the parliamentary business? Does it have potential to become an alternative force to take power in the next presidential election? Voters will have to find answers to these questions themselves.
Besides the questions about Park-Saenuri and Minjoo, voters should also ponder some questions about the People’s Party. Is the party fulfilling its promises to engage in politics different from the past? Can or should the party become a solid third party to end the domination of two big parties?
If you have got your all the scorecards of Park and major parties, it’s time to take a close look at the qualifications of individual candidates in your constituency.
Your bar should be high enough to block those unfit for parliamentary duty: people who have counts of criminal records or tax delinquencies or those who have a history of abusing their power and using foul language, and those who changed their party affiliations only to get elected.
All in all, it would be pretty difficult to make good choices, but there should be the second-best or the second-worst candidate — if you could not find the best one — and picking them would still be better than deciding not to go to the polling stations.
