Songpa B by-election

Jamsil baseball stadium in the north of the constituency. Picture  By Cyberdoomslayer.

About the district: Songpa is in Seoul. It is one of the richest areas in all of Korea right next to Gangnam. Songpa B is mostly the western part of Songpa, stretching from the Jamsil Baseball stadium in the north to the Garak market in the South.  The further north you can go in constituency the richer it becomes and the more likely residents are to vote for the Liberty Korea party.

It is also a swing district (bear in mind Grand National and New Frontier are both previous names of Liberty Korea)'

2004

Grand National49.5

Our Open Party 43.5

New Millennium Democratic7.0

(the Our Open Party and the New Millennium Democratic Party had only split shortly before the election and recombined shortly afterwards, good work there guys….)

2008

Grand National 61.6

Democrat 35.7

2012

New Frontier 50%

Democratic 46%

2016

Democratic - 44%*

Independent (with support of New Frontier)-  35.4

*Winner defected to the People’s party in 2017 before being kicked out of the assembly.

As you can see every election bar 2008 (a disaster nationwide for the Democratic party) has been pretty close.

Why is there a by-election?  

Former National Assembly member Choi Myeong-gil in happier times.

The previous representative Choi Myeong-gil kicked out for breaking campaign finance rules. He sent a message to someone who was not registered as one of his campaign workers asking them to put out his adverts on social media. He also asked them for about $2,000 which he claimed in court was to organise a book fair. He was given a fine of $2,000- politicians fined more than $1000 dollars or given a prison sentence lose their seats in the National Assembly.

His political was pretty short though in that time he managed to tour all the political parties. Before politics he was a reporter at MBC. He initially was a supporter of the New Frontier (now known as Liberty Korea) party before defecting to the Democrats. Despite a drink driving conviction and failing to get selected for a seat in his native Daejeon he was selected to fight the key marginal of Songpa B by the party leadership. He won his election in 2016 and quickly rewarded the party leader’s faith in him by defecting to the People’s Party in 2017 though shortly afterwards his conviction meant he was kicked out of the assembly. 

Meet the candidates

Choi Chae-song- Democratic Party

While majoring in Buddhist Studies at Dongguk University he was the university student president. He was involved in the democracy movement and was imprisoned. He is a career politician. He served for 12 years as the assembly member for Namyangju (a satellite town of Seoul). He once dubbed the government of Lee Myung-bak a ‘Gangnam richmans government’ , probably not realising he’d be running to represent the constituency next door next day. He held various roles within the Democratic party during his time in parliament. I can’t actually find out why he didn’t stand for election last time though there were rumours he was thinking of running for Governor of Gyeonggi Province. If anyone knows more please let me know! He is a long-time supporter of current President Moon Jae-in and has emphasised his relationship with the President in his campaign.

Bae Hyun-jin

Bae Hyun-jin is reasonably famous in Korea presenting MBC Newsdesk- one of the most popular news shows in the country- for 8 years. She left this role on March 7^th, announced she had joined the Liberty Korea party on March 9^th and became head of the Songpa party comitee March 16^th. Workers at MBC claimed there had been political interference at the company during the Presidency of Park Geun-hye and went on strike demanding (ultimately successfully) the removal of chief executive Kim Jang-gyeom. Bae Hyun-jin claims that she has been discriminated against for not taking part in the ‘politically motivated’ strikes.  She appears to be running a campaign aimed strongly at the Liberty Korea parties base making strong attacks on popular President Moon Jae-in.  She has got in to trouble for saying a gold prize in a University debating competition when she actually won a silver prize.

Park Jong-jin- Righteous Future Party

Yet another TV journalist! A lot less famous though- he worked as a correspondent on cable news channel MBN and then as a News-anchor on cable Channel A.

He has been the head of the local Righteous Future Party since July 2017.

Who is going to win?

There has been three opinion polls conducted:

Choi (Democratic) on 57%, Bae (Free Korea) 18% and Park (Righteous Future) 12%

Company	Date	Choi, Democratic	Bae, Free Korea	Park, Righteous Future
Chuwon-si-an-a-i	March 28	49.6	18.4	10.8
RS View	May 4	50.0	23.5	12.4
Gallup	May 9	52.1	17.4	8.6

The constituency usually closely mirrors national results and considering nationally the Democratic party now has a 30-40% opinion poll lead it appears set to do the same again.

Judging from her speeches on Youtube The Liberty Korea candidate seems to know she’s isn’t going to win running a campaign enamouring herself to the party’s base voters rather than potential swing voters presumably trying to set herself up for future attempts to run for office.