South Korea stays divided

I neglected to preview the legislative election in South Korea, held on Wednesday, but it can be quickly summarised. South Korea has a simple two-party system – the party names change periodically, but currently the centre-left is the Democratic Party and the centre-right is People Power – and a separation between executive and legislature on the American model. There is just one house of the legislature, called the National Assembly.

The two sorts of elections are out of alignment: the presidency has a five-year term but the legislature only sits for four. At the time of the last legislative election, in 2020, the centre-left held the presidency and it also won a legislative majority, taking 180 of the 300 seats. The centre-right won 103 and a range of minor parties and independents took the remaining 17, of which the Justice Party (left-wing) was the most successful with six.

Explaining how they fared in terms of votes is somewhat more difficult; there are both constituency seats (254 of them) and proportional seats (46). The centre-left cleaned up on the constituency seats, winning 49.9% of the vote there and 163 seats. But on the proportional seats the two were much more even, because there was competition from many more small left-of-centre parties; the centre-right came out slightly ahead, with 33.8% and 19 seats to 33.4% and 17 seats for the centre-left.

(It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, because the parties that won proportional seats were notionally different from the main parties, due to a move to game the system that the centre-right started, with the centre-left following suit. You can read all about it in my preview of the 2020 election.)

Then in March of 2022 the centre-right won the presidency, with a narrow victory for Yoon Suk-yeol, who had 48.6% of the vote against 47.8% for his centre-left opponent. For most of his tenure his government has performed poorly in the polls, but he argued that he would be able to do a better job if he had a more sympathetic legislature and wasn’t subject to the opposition’s obstruction.

Clearly the voters didn’t buy this argument at all. The centre-left was untroubled; it again won a big majority of the constituency seats, 162 to the centre-right’s 90. The centre-right again won more of the proportional vote, but that wasn’t enough to do it much good: with 36.7% it won 18 seats, as against 26.7% and 14 seats for the centre-left. A new party, the liberal and very anti-Yoon Rebuilding Korea Party, won 12 seats with 24.2% of the vote. (Results are all here, but only in Korean.)

So the combined opposition forces will have 192 seats to the government’s 108 – basically unchanged except for the disappearance of the independents. That won’t make Yoon’s time any easier, and it’s also a bad omen for the centre-right for the next presidential election. But since that’s not due until 2027 they have time to settle on a more popular candidate (presidents are limited to a single term), and if voters like the idea of divided government then that might count in their favor.