It appears that North Koreans are ready to launch another rocket to demonstrate that they can send a nuclear warhead to any target in the world.

American and Japanese security officials have been trying to devise countermeasures to this grave threat ever since the North’s fourth nuclear test early last month. South Korea’s dauntless politicians, on the other hand, seem least perturbed.

For months, the governing and opposition parties have been haggling with one another over proportional representation, after barely managing to come to an agreement to fix the number at 47 out of a total of 300 Assembly memberships. They have also been considering whether to lower the voting age by one year to 18 years old.

Elections are a little over two months away but lawmakers have yet to redraw electoral districts to reflect population changes as ordered by the Constitutional Court.

Partisan conflicts have been a constant malaise in Korean history from the monarchical times to the years of the Korean War and the post-war civilian and military dictatorships. Present-day politics are still just as unbearable, as they corrupt and immobilize the nation’s current hard-won democratic system.

Lawmakers in both ruling and opposition camps shift their political identifications based on whether it would increase their chances of reelection and rarely in pursuit of any true ideological cause or policy.

President Park Geun-hye is well aware of this endless splintering of the political community. And yet after three years in office, she appears to have given up efforts to improve the situation, preferring instead to isolate herself in the grand halls of the Blue House where she keeps complaining of a “vegetative legislature” that is unable to pass bills needed for her economic revival measures. 

She is fond of holding large-scale “conferences” in the presidential palace attended by hundreds of representatives from social and economic sectors who deliver opinions and suggestions that often sound rehearsed and lack spontaneity.

The relevant government officials offer instant remedial measures with little assurance of practicability. The older generation wonders if the president is reenacting her father’s monthly export-promotion meetings of the 1970s, an important public function during the time of Korea’s economic thrust. These days, another routine of the president appears to be visits to traditional markets to lift the spirits of small merchants. She also visits young venture enterprises to encourage these pioneers of the creative economy.

The president’s latest initiative was to push a 10 million-signature drive to pressure the National Assembly to expedite legislation to help revive the economy.

Many expected warm, tender leadership upon Park’s inauguration, especially in a political environment where charismatic leaders with claims of patriotic exploits in democratic development have departed. Instead, the new head of state showed character deficiency when it came to the diverse political and social spectra.

Division between the “pro-Park” group and dissenters within the ruling party deepened as the president exhibited little flexibility in casting away old rivalry which had begun in the presidential nomination contest in 2007. The media’s anatomy of the governing Saenuri party had its individual members classified by their closeness to the president or, more precisely, their distance from her.

Her remarks late last year indicating her backing of “consistently faithful people” in the forthcoming elections heated up an internal rift in the ruling party. Current party chair Kim Moo-sung, leader of the majority faction that binds all those outside the Park loyalist group, is destined to clash with the president as he insists on a bottom-up process in the party nomination for the Assembly elections, rejecting Blue House interference to give party tickets to the president’s choice candidates.

TV news showed a deplorable and even comic scene in one of Saenuri’s daily executive meetings last week. Rep. Suh Chung-won, Park’s top political guardian, lambasted Kim Moo-sung -- who was sitting right next to him -- for his recent criticism of the president over her role in introducing the current system that requires 60 percent majority support for the passage of hotly contended bills.

The so-called “Assembly Advancement Law” was enacted in 2012 to seek passage of bills through bipartisan compromise, preventing physical clashes between the majority and minority parties on the floor. After three years’ implementation, this legislative system is blamed for making the Assembly the most unproductive one in history in terms of handling bills proposed by the administration. The president, one of the active supporters of the bill, can now make a weak defense for it.

If she wants to assert leadership in tackling the dual adversity of North Korean WMD threats and the dormant economy, Park has to practice the accommodation and compromise that she had once advocated as a parliamentarian.

If she wants so badly to have her reform bills passed, she should first involve herself in negotiations for the new Assembly election system and ask the ruling party to concede a little to the opposition so as to seek a bigger win in the April polls. If she is not willing to do so, she had better stop complaining.

Regrettably, we now have a president who has much less influence on political goings-on than Kim Jong-in, who was given emergency stewardship of The Minjoo Party. The main opposition party’s septuagenarian adviser, who worked for Park in the 2012 presidential campaign, overturned an agreement the two major parties barely reached last week to pass some key bills. He was not willing to concede his trademark theme of “economic democratization” to the president by allowing his opposition colleagues to join in the legislation.

Despite their protests over the opposition’s non-cooperation, President Park and leaders of the Saenuri Party might still harbor considerable optimism from the division among their adversaries.

Renegades are reuniting under the “new politics” banner of the People’s Party raised by Ahn Cheol-su. The Minjoo Party of Korea’s Moon Jae-in, the 2012 presidential candidate, finally passed the baton to caretaker Kim Jong-in, after a year of futile efforts to keep the party from sinking deeper into the quagmire of regional and generational differences.

Parties hope for election victories but we have lost hope in them.

Amid the upcoming election craze, it seems that our politicians are not sensing the danger that the nation faces. Nowhere in sight are true leaders who tell us what crisis we are in and how we can overcome it together.

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. He can be reached at kmyongsik@hanmail.net – Ed.