South Korea will vote to choose a successor to the People Power Party’s disgraced former president Yoon Suk Yeol, whose removal from office threw the country into turmoil.
Yoon’s impeachment over a disastrous declaration of martial law, which saw armed soldiers deployed to parliament, made him the second straight conservative president to be stripped of office after Park Geun-hye in 2017.
Analysts say a reckoning has been brewing for years – as the party has not thoroughly addressed its links to the country’s authoritarian past.
“It’s fair to say that the current political crisis in South Korea was already under way when Park Geun-hye won the election in 2012,” said Minseon Ku, a postdoctoral researcher at the William & Mary Global Research Institute.
Former president Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, was a military dictator who ruled the country with an iron fist for more than 15 years.
Running for Saenuri, a predecessor of the PPP, Park tapped into nostalgia for the rapid economic growth of her father’s authoritarian era.
But critics say this is no way for the party to win long-term support in the democratic South, pointing to the growing fragmentation of the right, which has drawn in anti-feminist young men and extreme religious figures, but lost much of the middle.
The PPP is now facing an “ideological identity crisis”, Ku told AFP.
Yoon, a former star prosecutor, was a political novice when he became the PPP’s presidential candidate – a sign the party had failed even then to cultivate in-house talent capable of appealing to a broad cross-section of society, analysts say.
Yoon won the 2022 election by the narrowest margin in South Korean history, defeating the Democratic Party’s Lee Jae-myung – who is now the clear frontrunner for the June 3 vote.
During that campaign, Yoon sparked controversy by saying that former president Chun Doo-hwan – a military dictator responsible for the 1980 Gwangju massacre – was “quite good at politics in many people’s view”.
On Dec 3, 2024, Yoon tried to suspend civilian rule, justifying his bid as necessary to break legislative gridlock and “root out” pro-North Korean, “anti-state” forces.
PPP lawmakers initially refused to join an opposition-led vote to impeach him, but after days of mass street protests enough of them defected to allow the motion to pass.
Weeks later, when prosecutors moved to arrest Yoon on insurrection charges, some PPP lawmakers physically intervened to block authorities from entering his residence.
The party’s former leader, Han Dong-hoon – once a Yoon ally – faced an intense internal backlash for publicly opposing Yoon’s martial law attempt.
Its current presidential candidate, Kim Moon-soo – Yoon’s former labour minister – rose to public attention for refusing to join a cabinet-wide apology bow over the failure to stop martial law.
Critics have repeatedly called for the PPP’s dissolution, with the DP’s candidate branding it “a party of insurrection and military rebellion”.
All major polls place liberal candidate Lee as the clear frontrunner for the June 3 vote, and given the retaliatory nature of South Korean politics, experts say his victory could further accelerate the PPP’s downward spiral.
The party “lost the moral high ground due to the insurrection”, said Byunghwan Ben Son, a professor at George Mason University.
It “now faces significant legal burdens as investigations into various corruption charges involving Yoon and his wife continue”, he added.
The new government “could also file a constitutional review of the PPP”, he told AFP, which could potentially lead to the party’s dissolution.
The party has also faced sharp criticism from its own former leaders, with one of them, Lee Jun-seok, now running with a separate party and refusing to unite with the PPP against the DP’s Lee.
Lee’s Democratic Party already holds a parliamentary majority, and analysts say the fractured conservative base will struggle in opposition unless it can resolve its issues.
The PPP will become a relic unless it succeeds in “rebranding itself and distancing itself from its unsavoury past”, said Vladimir Tikhonov from the University of Oslo.
If Lee wins, “I won’t be surprised if the PPP splits, with influential bosses and faction heads leaving the sinking ship,” the Korea studies professor told AFP.