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Korea set to vote after political reform campaign

SEOUL: South Korea's 33 million voters head to the polls on Thursday to elect a new National Assembly after a campaign that focused on ties with North Korea and the need to clean up the country's often sleazy politics.

This week's surprise announcement that President Kim Dae-jung would travel to Pyongyang for a historic June 12-14 summit with the reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has scrambled the electoral calculus.

The election is being viewed as a mid-term referendum on President Kim's administration. His five-year presidential term ends in 2003. The last voter surveys from late last month - they're not allowed to be published in the last 16 days before an election - showed the right-of-centre Grand National Party (GNP) ahead in 107 constituencies for the 273-seat National Assembly.

President Kim's Millennium Democratic Party (MDP), the first opposition group to occupy the presidential Blue House, led in 97. Small parties and independents split the rest.

Campaigning on Wednesday was winding down in eerie quiet, the expected last blast from the Grand National Party just a reiteration that the government should spell out if any promises, such as aid, were made to win Pyongyang's agreement to the summit in June.

Auto workers who held protests on Tuesday turned to conference tables, where union leaders remained deadlocked in early evening over whether to extend beyond Wednesday a strike protesting against plans to sell troubled Daewoo Motor to a foreign company.

Shadowy figures from the past, ex-presidents Kim Young-sam, Roh Tae-woo and Chun Doo-hwan also missed their last curtain call, as some pundits had predicted they might try to help the GNP, a successor to their former parties.

The 1,036 candidates were combing this mountainous country of 46 million people, screaming slogans into public address systems at street corner rallies.

And, as is so often the case, North Korea emerged as the focal point of debate.

With the economy fully recovered from the 1997-98 "Asian Contagion" financial crisis, the opposition had been scoring points by pouring scorn over President Kim's conciliatory policy towards the North for not yielding any tangible benefits.

The summit announcement caught them flatfooted.

At separate news conferences on Tuesday, leaders of the three opposition parties expressed grudging support for the summit in principle, but demanded to know what the government had promised Pyongyang in exchange for the election-eve summit gift.

They noted that North Korea in the past has demanded the abolition of the National Security Law, which outlaws communism, and the withdrawal of the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea as preconditions for high-level talks.

"If President Kim has agreed to any of these demands from the Communist North, he is putting the lives of our people and the security of our nation in Kim Jong-il's hands," said GNP President Lee Hoi-chang.

In South Korea, political power resides largely in the executive branch, although parliament can make life difficult for the president by blocking legislation.

While the economy grew at a blistering 10.7 percent pace last year, many voters complain the recovery has largely benefited the well-to-do, and that income gaps are widening.

The electorate has also been disillusioned by a series of petty corruption scandals in Kim's administration, which was a factor in the MDP losing two by-elections late last year.

A coalition of activist groups has tapped into this wellspring of discontent, issuing blacklists of candidates with unsavoury pasts and using the Internet to communicate with their two million members.

"We believe that the political environment is evolving in Korea towards greater civil empowerment, which should increase the transparency and accountability of future governments," said Philip Wee, Treasury Economist at Standard Chartered in Singapore.

If President Kim fails to get a majority, which most analysts say seems likely, he will embark on an old Korean political tradition: entice defectors to cross the floor or form a coalition with one of the smaller parties.-Reuters