[In-Depth Look] Various Ways to Cross a River

In the fall of 2019, I received a call from a junior reporter I knew well. It was a request for a character evaluation of Cho Kuk, a Seoul National University professor who had been nominated as Minister of Justice at the time. I was a student of former Minister of Justice Cho Kuk. During my law school years, I took all criminal law courses except for the general theory of criminal law from him. His classes were very popular, always packed with students, including auditors from other departments. Because I liked him very much, I told the junior reporter in an interview that “he is a very principled person, so there should be no problems during the confirmation hearing, and he will uphold the law and principles well as Minister of Justice.” However, right after hanging up, I called the junior reporter back and asked to have my interview content removed from the article. Even now, I do not know why I did that, but somehow I felt I had to.

Then came the well-known incident, the so-called ‘Cho Kuk affair.’ After that event, many people’s lives changed. I believe that Yoon Seok-yeol, the former Prosecutor General who was elected president in the early morning of March 10, 2022, also experienced significant changes in his life after that incident. The revision of the election law, satellite parties, 180 seats, and amendments to the Housing Lease Protection Act followed in rapid succession. Housing prices and then monthly rent prices soared. Around that time, I started using social networking services (SNS) for the first time. Had I started SNS a year earlier, the political leanings of my SNS friends would surely have been very different from those now.

The incidents did not stop there. The suicide of the incumbent Mayor of Seoul, the victim complainant issue, the LH scandal, the Daejang-dong scandal, the vaccine pass, deaths from vaccine side effects, and the suffering of self-employed people continued endlessly, one after another. When I turned on the TV, experts full of intellect appeared as panelists discussing the economy, fairness, justice, and human rights, yet the lives of the people only grew harder. Through this process, I saw many different sides of many people, and I still do.

Although it was a defeat by a very narrow margin, I believe that for the ruling party, which had been compared to the June Struggle candlelight protests, having to step down after only five years will come as a shock greater than that. Still, the Democratic Party cannot be considered completely ruined yet. It still holds an absolute majority of 180 seats in the National Assembly and retains support close enough to lose the presidential election by only 0.7%.

If, based on a thorough reflection and introspection of the past five years, it can reinvent itself as a party for the socially and economically vulnerable whom the entrenched powers have overlooked, it might be able to cross the river of trials, which seems narrow compared to the river of impeachment that the conservatives overcame. Now, in front of the People Power Party, which is starting anew after crossing the river of impeachment, lies an even wider river of division and conflict. Starting from real estate and low birth rates, it must solve numerous pressing problems and overcome regional conflicts to resolve and integrate the national divisions that have expanded into generational and gender conflicts. Fortunately, the president-elect expressed in his first press conference his aspiration to “build a country of unity and prosperity together with the great people.” I sincerely hope the new government will be one that can cross this wide river of suffering that lies before not just one political faction but all our people together.

Sangsoo Park, Vice President of the Korean Bar Association

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.