Nowon C by-election

About the constituency: The constituency is in the far North-East of the city of Seoul- This is an Assembly Constiuency map of Seoul with Nowon C highlighted in red:

Nowon is the densest populated area of Seoul though is bordered to the north by relatively mountainous areas. It is a fairly standard residential suburb of Seoul.  

Past results: The district has been highly unpredictable in the past returning candidates from all over the political spectrum in the past. However, one trend is that the Liberty Korea party and its predecessor parties have been in gradual decline here for a decade. The neighbouring Nowon A and Nowon B districts are both held by the Democratic party

Previous Results by % (winners % in bold):

	Democrat*	Liberty Korea*	Minjung*	Righteous Future*	Justice party*	other
2004 general election	45.2*	37.0	6.8	Did not run	Did not run	11.0*
2008 general election	16.3	43.1	40.1	Did not run	Did not run	0.6
2012 general election	Did not run	39.6	57.2	Did not run	Did not run	3.2
2013 by election	Did not run	32.7	0.8	60.4	1.9	0.3
2016 general election	13.9	31.3	0.3	52.3	5.7	0.3
2018 by-election	Running	Running	Not running	Running	Not running

Why is there a by-election?- Ahn Cheol-Soo resigned over a year ago to run for President. It will be one of twelve by-elections held on the 13th of June. Read more about the general context here. http://koreaelections.blogspot.kr/2018/05/national-assembly-by-elections.html


Meet the candidates:

On the left Democratic Parties Kim Seong-Hwan, in the middle Liberty Korea’s Gang Yeon-Jae and on the right Righteous Future’s Lee Chun-Seok from http://news.joins.com/article/22645452

Democratic Party- Kim Seong-Hwan. He has produced a video featuring pictures of him wearing hard hats, meeting old people etc. which probably doesn’t deserve many more than the 270 views it has got on youtube. He has served as the head of the district office in Nowon for 8 years, resigning to fight the election. He has previously served as a councillor in Nowon and was Secetary for Policy Co-ordination for President Ro.  

Righteous Future Party- Lee Chun-seok. A former member of Park Geun-Hae’s New Frontier Party is the local head of the Righteous Future Parties regional committee.

Liberty Korea Party- Gang Yeon-jae.  She was formally a member of Ahn’s People’s Party and has seemingly made attacking her former leader the focus of her campaign.

Who is going to win:

These are elections are going to be very good for the Democratic Party and that will probably mean they win in Nowon. Polls show the Democrats around 35-50 points ahead in the Seoul region and Nowon, like Seoul as a whole, has generally drifted away from the Liberty Korea party and its predecessors in the past decade. Given the general state of their opinion polling this is unlikely to be the year the Liberty Korea party makes a comeback in the district. Notionally Lee Chun-seok of the Righteous Future party is fighting for the incumbent party but Ahn Cheol-Soo was a nationally famous figure which Lee is not. When the relatively famous No Hoe-Chan and his high name recoginition was forced to resign his seat after publishing the names of prosecutors who had taken bribes from Samsung his chosen successor polled badly, receiving under 6% of the vote. A vox popping journalist Ahn Hyo-Seong found no one on the street who could name the election candidates suggesting that most people will vote on party lines which considering the opinion polls can only be good news for the Democratic Party.

This district has had two notable people as assembly members in the recent past so I thought I’d write about them a bit as well.  

First No Hoe-Chan. After graduating with a degree in political science from Korea University he trained to be a welder so he could be involved in trade union organising. He was often in trouble for this work and was imprisoned from 1989-92. He has been a member of various left wing political parties. He became a member of the National Assembly in 2004 when elected on the proportional representation list for the United Democratic Labour Party. In 2005 he shot to prominence by publishing parts of the ‘Samsung X files’ that had previously been unpublished. These were recording made by South Korean spies of Samsung executives arranging bribes of politicians and prosecutors. He was also prominent in the anti-US beef protests of 2008. He then ran as a United Progressive Party candidate in Nowan C district narrowly loosing. He ran again 2012 and won when the Democratic Party stood aside for him. However his party soon collapsed into infighting and he formed a coalition with the another left wing party to form the Justice Party. At the same time he had been winning and losing elections and founding new political parties legal wrangling from the Samsung X files case had been going on. He was ultimately convicted of illegally publishing the tapes and given a suspended sentence which meant he had to resign his seat in the assembly triggering a by-election.

He returned to the Assembly as a proportional member for the Justice Party in 2016 and serves as their leader in the assembly.  

Next Ahn Cheol-soo. Ahn initially trained is a medical doctor and has a masters degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania however made his money through his company Ahn Lab which is the main provider of anti-virus software in South Korea. Ahn had flirted with a political career for years- considering running for Mayor of Seoul in 2011 before ultimately launching an independent bid for the presidency in 2012. He pulled out before the election endorsing Moon Jae-in who lost to Park Geun-hye. He then ran as in independent in the Nowon by-election of 2013 winning comfortably. Ahn considered setting up his own party before ultimately joining the Democratic Party and becoming joint leader. After disappointing local election results in 2014 Ahn resigned as a joint leader, with Moon Jae-in taking over sole leadership. Ahn soon split from the Democratic Party to found the people’s party and had surprising success at the 2016 National Assembly elections securing 38 seats and actually beating the Democratic Party on the proportional representation ballot. On the back of this success he launched a Presidential campaign in 2017 triggering this by-election (candidates for president cannot be members of the National Assembly. His promise of leftist economic reforms with a strong national security policy briefly proved popular and he moved into a very close 2^nd place in the opinion polls in early April but poor debate performances and voters returning to the Liberty Korea party ultimately led him to finish third getting slightly over half the number of votes of winner Moon Jae-in. Since then his party has split with his faction forming a new party with a split from the Liberty Korea Party to form the new Righteous Future party. He is currently running to be Mayor of Seoul

* Korean parties change their names all the time but they stay pretty much the same people with the odd defection with each name change. These are the names the parties currently use so the parties didn’t have these names in every past election. In 2004 the Democratic wing was split with the 10%  of the New Millennium Democratic Party included in the other column. Ahn ran as an independent in 2013 and ran as leader of the new People’s Party in 2016. No Hoe-Chan ran for the United Democratic Labour Party in 2008 and the Unified Progressive Party in 2012 however left to the Justice Party shortly after that, before being kicked out of parliament. 

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