The victorious government will still have to grapple with covid-19 and the coming recession
man outside the polling station was adamant. “Of course it was right to hold these elections. It’s our basic right,” said Kim Su-ho, a 24-year-old voter in Seoul, the capital. “We’re not like Europe or America where they failed to slow the spread. There was no reason to postpone them.” His fellow South Koreans, it appeared, agreed: by the time the polls closed on April 15th, 66.2% of eligible voters had cast a ballot, more than in any parliamentary election since 1992.
The virus-defying vote brought a resounding victory for the ruling Minjoo Party of Moon Jae-in, the president. Minjoo won 180 of the 300 seats in the National Assembly, including seats won by an affiliated party it set up to contest the proportional portion of the vote in the country’s hybrid electoral system. United Future, the main conservative opposition party, came a distant second with 103 seats including proportional ones from its affiliate, down from 122 seats in 2016.
The main reason for Minjoo’s unprecedented success seems to have been the government’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. Before the outbreak, Mr Moon’s fortunes had been taking a turn familiar to previous South Korean presidents towards the middle of their term. His flagship policies of reining in the country’s big conglomerates and pursuing rapprochement with North Korea had flagged.
The result bodes well for Mr Moon’s agenda during the remaining two years of his term. The president is still short of the two-thirds majority required to pass his proposals for constitutional reform. But Minjoo’s absolute majority will put an end to the parliamentary deadlock, if not the physical altercations, that have hampered lawmaking during the early stages of his term.
Still, claims that the election marks a fundamental shift in South Korean politics seem premature. The partisan divide between progressive strongholds in Seoul and the south-west and the conservative heartland in the south-east was even more pronounced than at the previous election. Many of Minjoo’s additional seats were won back from the People’s Party, a progressive outfit that split from Minjoo before the vote in 2016.
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