Moon won 13.4 million votes (41 percent) against his conservative rival Hong Jun-pyo’s 7.8 million votes (24 percent). The election represented a major defeat for South Korea’s reactionary conservative forces, but we will have to wait to see if Moon can meet the expectations of the millions of South Koreans who fought to throw his predecessor out of office. [...]
Even if Moon sincerely means his election promises, he will find it very difficult to challenge the deep-seated structures that created South Korea’s culture of state-capital collusion and allowed the nation’s chaebols (conglomerates) to gain dominance. Further, Moon may prove unable — or even willing — to make the kinds of changes that would address the country’s most pressing issues: youth unemployment, soaring inequality, and a crisis-prone political system. Perhaps most significantly of all, it seems unlikely that Moon will cut the Gordian knot that binds South Korea to the United States and keeps it at the center of Northeast Asia’s geopolitical vortex. [...]
At the same time, however, he belongs to the Catholic Church and holds some socially conservative views. When asked during a debate about the military’s persecution of gay soldiers, Moon responded that he opposed homosexuality in general. On the campaign trail, he emphasized national security and played up his credentials as a former member of South Korea’s special forces, signaling that the country’s deep state had nothing to fear from his victory. [...]
The moment clearly illustrated that South Korea has become a peculiar hybrid of a Cold War–developmental state and hypercompetitive neoliberal dystopia. The government still places economic development and defending against the “red menace” as its most important tasks, just as it has since the country’s founding amid anticommunist massacres in 1948. However, neoliberal policies have joined this orientation, leading to a rapid deregulation of the labor market, finance sector, and educational institutions. This combination has created a rampantly competitive society that has the second highest suicide rate in the world. [...]
South Korea has seen a series of great popular uprisings, from the April Revolution of 1960 to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and the democratic revolution of 1987. Unlike these, the government did not attempt to suppress the 2016–17 movement by force, probably due to the administration’s weakness and the splits that fractured the ruling class. Even the elite’s pet journal, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, came out against the president.
