Belated Election Round Up

Even this place voted Democrat

Wikipedia actually has a pretty good summary of the results in English and if you can read Hangul namu wiki has a better run down  so this will be pretty brief.

Things that went as expected

1) Big victory for the Democrats.

They got 51% of the vote nationally (tbh a bit less than I expected) with a 23% lead over the 2^nd place Liberty Korea party. They won 12 out of 13 national assembly special elections. Won all but 3 of the races for Governors and Metropolitan Mayors (basically the governors of big cities). They won 652 out of 824 of the seats in provincial assemblies and 1638 out of 2926 seats in county level elections (when rural, Liberty Korea supporting areas get more seats). It is the most convincing win in a Korean election since 1960. Even dictators who had complete control of the media, rigged the elections and had no intention of giving up power even if they somehow lost didn’t win by this much.  They even won in Gumi which was the birthplace of Park Chung-hee the military dictator of Korea in the 60s and 70s who is still perhaps the most important figure in the history of the Liberty Korea party and its predecessor parties (his daughter was President until she was impeached in 2017). They have a big statue of him, named their sports stadium after him and do ceremonies on his birthday. But even they elected Democrats.

2) The crushing of the Righteous Future party

They got just 8% of the vote. Their biggest name Ahn Cheol-soo (once the most popular politician in Korea) came third in the Seoul mayor’s race with 19.6% of the vote. They didn’t come close in any of the governor or big mayoral races. In fact they didn’t win any mayoral races and have just 5 provincial legislators and 21 local councillors. 

Being a third party (or as they have now become a 4th party) in a mostly First Past the post system is hard and to have any hope you of success need to have support that is highly concentrated in specific geographic areas. 8% of the vote everywhere means zero seats whereas 2% of the vote in most places and 40% in a few will win you a few elections. For example the Liberal Democrats in the UK do well in the south west of England, in ‘fringe’ areas of the UK (far Northern Scotland, very rural bits of England and Wales) and incredibly wealthy areas with a liberal bent. This concentration of support in specific areas means they always win at least a handful of seats even when they poll in the single figures nationally. However the Righteous Future party did equally badly everywhere which means they were almost completely wiped out. In fact the Democracy and Peace party, a centre-left split from the Righteous Future party managed to outperform their former colleagues in seats despite getting far fewer votes. They got just 1.5% of the vote nationally but this was all concentrated in Jeolla (south west area which contains all the Democrats safest seats) and managed to win 5 mayoral races and 49 local councillors. What will add to the worries of the Righteous Future Party is that the Liberty Korea party’s leader Hong Jun-pyo has resigned. He is a walking, talking caricature  of a Liberty Korea politician who is seemingly designed to repel the large chunk of Korean voters who do not belong to either of the main factions in Korean politics. While it is not clear who the Liberty Korea party will select next it is at least possible they could pick someone more appealing to the swing voters and moderate conservatives who voted for Righteous Future in 2018.

In National Assembly elections 47 out of 300 seats are awarded via proportional representation and this looks being the only way the Righteous Future Party will be able to secure seats in the future.

Something I didn’t expect

The relative success of the Justice Party. They got 8% of the vote making them Korea’s third biggest party and giving them the best result of a party to the left of the Democrats since 2012. While the First Past the Post nature of the elections meant they didn’t even come close in any of the main elections and didn’t even mange to win a local mayoral race they did win 11 provincial legislators seats (they didn’t win any 4 years ago) and 26 local council races (up from 11 4 years ago).