President Park Geun-hye shakes hands with Saenuri Party Chairman Kim Moo-suing prior to their talks at Cheong Wa Dae on July 16.

Saenuri Party Chairman Kim Moo-sung shakes hands with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as Kim met with Ban at United Nations headquarters in New York on July 30 on a leg of his tour to the United States. They agreed to make concerted efforts to ensure peace in the Korean Peninsula.

A little more than one year has passed since Rep. Kim Moo-sung was elected to chairman of the ruling Saenuri Party. “I’ve devoted myself to put politics on the right track to meet public expectations and demands for the past one year,” Saenuri Chairman Kim said. “I’ve taken up such issues as people’s livelihood, shared growth and co-prosperity, integration, the party’s changes and innovation and put my soul and strength to realize them, but I feel unhappy that there are not a few things that should have been done well.”

Kim made the remarks in his first year in office while meeting with reporters on July 13, on the eve of the first anniversary of his inauguration. 

Expounding the path the Saenuri Party will take and its vision, Chairman Kim stressed the need for putting the National Assembly on the right track. He reminded of the public pledge he made while running for the chairmanship: “I’ve promised to make sure that the party will become one owned by party members,” he said. “The only thing I wish to leave behind during my political career is the establishment of so-called Party Democracy.”

He was apparently referring to a party democracy in which parties of the National Assembly are owned genuinely by party members and the people, not swayed by a few party big shots with rights to nominate parliamentary election candidates.  

Chairman Kim advocates an “open primary system” to break the mold of the current Korean political community, one of Korea’s backward areas. The Saenuri Party, in his stewardship, has decided to accept the system. 

Explaining the rationale behind the introduction of the open primary system, Kim said, “The inappropriate nomination process in the political community has spanned out factional strife and spawned a bad cycle of party division and internal fighting.” 

He said each parliamentarian is wise, but they tend to be scurrying up for finding connections with those in upper echelons whenever the nomination season arrives, and the harmful consequences of factional politics has become the subject of public uproar. He declared, “I will be the party chairman who does not exercise nomination rights.”

Kim said he favors a bottom-up nomination process to hand over the nomination rights to party members and the people.  

“Our party’s good performances in the two by-elections are owed to the bottom-up nomination process regional constituents want to take,” Kim said. “I’ll never forget people’s love for backing the party in the July 30, 2014 by-elections and the April 29, 2015 by-elections.”

When it comes to a bottom-up nomination process, nomination can be innovated only when ruling and opposition parties join forces, according to Kim. Some lawmakers of the major opposition party favor partly strategic nominations and remainder depending on bottom-up nominations, and it is the reason political circles cannot achieve the reforming of the nomination process the way regional constituents want, he said. 

Kim emphasized that ruling and opposition parties jointly should accept an open primary system. He urged the opposition party to join forces in the efforts to reform nomination, saying that the solution of nomination can led to the disappearance of 90 percent of all corruption and bad practices in the political community. 

The chairman’s second top priority task is the revision of the Act on the Advancement of the National Assembly. The act partly contributed to the preventing of the using of physical forces between ruling and opposition parties, but the opposition, albeit a minority party, has attempted to keep people hostage by deceitfully taking advantage of the act, he said. For instance, the opposition party held his feet to the fire, blocking the passage of a bill to reform public officials’ pension, a big issue of high public concern, demanding the passage of their favored bills for their interests. He lobbed a barrage of criticism on the opposition party’s irresponsible political practice of gaining partisan interests irrespective of the public interest by taking advantage of the act. 

Kim also stressed a democracy based on consensus. A democracy has successfully settled down in the procedural perspective, but it is not the case in term of realizing democracy in reality, and people are disgusted at the state of the political arena, which is engulfed in extreme confrontation. He pointed out the need for ushering in a democracy based on consensus, dialogue, compromise and concession for mutual cooperation, co-prosperity and co-existence. The Democracy 3.0 Strategy is not something the Saenuri Party concocted to win the 2016 general elections and the 2017 presidential election. It’s more important than that. 

Chairman Kim said the party, the government and Cheong Wa Dae have attached top priority to revitalizing the sagging national economy.

The Saenuri Party chairman reconfirmed his determination to introduce an open primary system, dubbed “Public Nomination System,” at an awards ceremony in which he received an honorable politics doctorate from Dongguk University on Aug. 20.

One of the most significant achievements for the party during his chairmanship is the reforming of public officials’ pension, which was done in a short period of time, an unprecedented move in comparison to decades in advanced countries, he said in an interview for the August issue of the Saenuri Party’s website Saenuri Vision, on the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule. 

Chairman Kim pledged to push ahead with the reforming of the labor market without fail, even though it could require lots of pain to ensure balanced growth and distribution of wealth. He also touched on the need for the introduction of an open primary system to transform the fundamentals of the political arena and reinvent it for tremendous changes. In reality, he is considered to be one of the major conservative hopefuls of the 2017 presidential election. 

Saenuri Party Chairman Kim shakes hands with U.S. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi during their meeting on July 28. They exchanged views on issues, including Korean “comfort women” of Japanese imperial army.

Preparing for Another 70 Years

“It is significant to mark the 70th anniversary of liberation since we not only look back at the past, but also we have to prepare for coming 70 years,” Chairman Kim said. He made clear his opposition to students’ negative views over Korea’s past history. 

“Korea has evolved from an aid recipient country to an aid donor country in a one generation, and the sole country to achieve industrialization and democratization simultaneously. In the process, Korea’s conservatives have played pivotal roles and contributed to raising Korea to the ranks of world-class countries,” he said, 

Kim added, “Until now the Miracle of Hangang is achieved in the period of the first Korean Renaissance, and from now on, unification is a key to Korea’s ascent to an advanced country, so unification will have to be realized to eliminate the dishonor of a divided country.”