Roh's exit from MDP.

(From The Korea Herald)

In spring 2002 when the primaries of the Millennium Democratic Party began, Roh Moo-hyun was an underdog trailing behind such party giants as Lee In-je and Han Hwa-kap. Unexpectedly in Kwangju, the center of the party's power base, he emerged as the victor, overtaking his rivals one by one to clinch the candidacy in the final vote in Seoul. In the eyes of the party old guards Roh, who did not have strong roots in the party, was still a weak candidate. And when fluctuating opinion polls put him down below opposition candidates they pushed a scheme to back a different horse, possibly Chung Mong-joon whose popularity was shooting up after the FIFA World Cup.

But Roh managed to keep the candidacy and break with Chung and he won the election in December. When, after his inauguration last February, Roh's close aides initiated a stealthy move to form a new party, it was seen by many as a political vendetta, aimed at ditching those old guards who tried to dump him.

The president first denied that he was behind the new party drive, which its promoters asserted was designed to broaden the support base of the ruling party and make inroads into the hostile south-eastern region. When the MDP was eventually split last month by the departure of pro-Roh members, the president did not bother to hide his sympathy for them but maintained his MDP membership.

The rejection by the National Assembly of Roh's nominee to head the Board of Audit and Inspection last week, in which at least a dozen MDP members were believed to have cast a no vote, prompted Roh to make a decision. The president announced his exit from the MDP Monday and the republic, for the first time, has a chief executive with no party affiliation in the initial stage of his administration. In the past, presidents quit only in the final phase to demonstrate their neutrality in an election. All political parties except the new pro-Roh party on the drawing board lambasted the president's "irresponsibility" by throwing national politics into disarray. The MDP stalwarts in particular called it treachery for abandoning the party that made him president.

Reviewing the sequence of events that led to the president's departure from the hitherto ruling party only seven months after he took office, we come to the frustrating notion that he should have chosen a different course. First of all, he should have tried to prevent the separation of the party by all means, without taking a bogus stand of neutrality. Now few believe that the president played no part in the new party move. It is a great cause and an urgent task to overhaul a ...