By Andy Jackson
The current presidential election was starting to look like Lee Myung-bak's victory lap after the ``real'' contest for the main opposition Grand National Party (GNP) nomination.
Like most observers of Korean politics, I kept expecting Chung Dong-young to eventually close the gap between Lee and himself in the polls. Chung did get a bit of a boost after he secured the United New Democratic Party nomination but Lee's numbers showed no signs of dropping below 40 percent.
Even the inevitable scandal (real or manufactured) failed to mix things up. Each supposed revelation about Lee regarding the ongoing ``BBK'' case seemed to be greeted by a collective yawn from the electorate and Lee continued to enjoy broad support on the way to what looked like certain victory.
In short, the presidential race was in danger of getting boring.
The former GNP chairman is a 72-year-old hard-line conservative with a wooden personality who has lost the last two presidential elections. That does not sound like the kind of person who would shake things up, but he has done just that.
Lee Hoi-chang's entry into the presidential field has upset the established dynamic of the race. It has also raised a number of intriguing election scenarios.
The most obvious and most talked about possibility is that the two Lees will split the conservative vote, allowing a progressive candidate, most likely Chung, to slip into the Blue House with as little as 35 percent of the vote.
It is just that kind of factional split that allowed Roh Tae-woo to beat Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam in 1987. Ten years later, Kim Dae-jung took advantage of a division among conservatives to win.
But Chung still has to double his current rate of support to get within striking distance of the 35 percent or more he would need to win. Even reaching that low goal may be difficult. He has so far not shown that he can drastically increase his support beyond his UNDP base.
To make matters worse for Chung, having conservatives divided takes some of the pressure off independent progressive candidate Moon Kook-hyun to drop out of the race and back him.
At the same time, his continued weakness in the polls increases his need to get him on board his campaign quickly. Even the ongoing merger talks with the Democratic Party reveal weakness, with Chung offering an equal partnership with a party that has less than 10 seats in the National Assembly. Naturally, rank-and-file UNDP members have baulked at the idea.
There will most likely be a single major progressive candidate on election day, but Chung has yet to make the case that he should be that candidate.
If Chung cannot close the gap with the conservative candidates in the next two weeks, Kim and Democratic Party nominee Rhee In-jae could legitimately claim that he is not the man to lead the progressives to victory.
Chung's continued weakness may even allow the Democratic Labor Party's Kwon Young-ghil to emerge as a serious contender for the progressive vote.
Lee Hoi-chang's path to victory requires continued appeals to conservatives who are not satisfied with Lee Myung-bak's support of engagement with Pyongyang, and who are worried that the ongoing BBK stock private rigging scandal will cripple the GNP nominee. We can expect Lee Hoi-chang to hit the GNP candidate on both issues over the next several weeks.
Ironically, Lee Hoi-chang might not want to knock Lee Myung-bak completely out of the race. Both his famously stiff style and his age (he would be the oldest Korean president since Syngman Rhee) places limits on the broadness of his political appeal.
He would find it difficult to get the 45 percent support or more he would need to win in a two-man race against a single progressive candidate. He needs Lee Myung-bak to stay in the race to prevent moderates from switching over to Chung or another progressive candidate.
The ideal scenario for Lee Hoi-chang is for a weakened Lee Myung-bak to remain in the race until election day, allowing the older Lee to barely win with around 35 percent of the vote.
Lee Myung-bak is still in a strong position, despite Lee Hoi-chang's joining the race. He is still the only candidate who could realistically map out a strategy for winning with over half of the vote.
The ideal scenario for Lee Myung-bak is Lee Hoi-chang dropping out of the race a week or two before election day once he realizes that he does not have enough support to win. With Lee Myung-bak holding on to most moderate voters and with conservatives having nowhere else to go, it would mean a landslide victory for him.
In fact, having a challenger on the right might even help Lee Myung-bak somewhat if Kim Kyung-joon, his former business associate at the now-defunct investment firm BBK, testifies against him in return for a reduction in criminal charges.
A deepening scandal could cause more of the GNP candidate's conservative backers to shift their support to Lee Hoi-chang. Faced with the prospect of a Lee Hoi-chang victory and continued weakness on the part of Chung Dong-young and other candidates on the left, moderate and even some progressive voters may rally to Lee Myung-bak as the only hope of keeping a more strident right-winger out of the Blue House.
A similar situation happened in the French runoff election in 2002, when conservative Jacques Chirac defeated right winger Jean-Marie Le Pen with support from the defeated socialists.
Whichever scenario plays itself out over the next five weeks, Korean politics has reverted to the wild ride that we know and love.
Andy Jackson teaches American government in the Lakeland College bridge program at Ansan College, Gyeonggi Province. He can be reached at andyinrok@yahoo.com.