Conservative commentator Cho Gap-je, head of Chogapje.com, and independent lawmaker Han Dong-hoon during his time as a presidential candidate. [Yonhap]
Conservative commentator Cho Gap-je, head of Chogapje.com, and independent lawmaker Han Dong-hoon during his time as a presidential candidate. [Yonhap]

Conservative commentator Cho Gap-je, head of Chogapje.com, warned Friday that the People Power Party will remain a "sterile party" branded as a defender of insurrection and a "wellness party" unless its rank-and-file members rise up, expel party leader Jang Dong-hyeok and reinstate lawmaker Han Dong-hoon to forge new leadership.

In a Facebook post, Cho said "bold predictions" had emerged that the PPP could win both the general election and the presidential election following the ruling Democratic Party's push to pass what he called rule-of-law-destroying legislation on Friday. "The PPP is in the grip of what amounts to the Democratic Party's strategic assets, and its lawmakers obey like a colonial bureaucracy — do people really think such a miracle will happen on its own?" he wrote.

Cho drew a sharp contrast between what he described as the dynamism and fierce ideological battles on display at the Democratic Party's national convention and what he called the PPP's far-right conduct as a party that had "degenerated into an agitator for election-fraud conspiracy theories." He urged the PPP once again to reform itself.

"Most of the PPP's colonial-bureaucrat-type lawmakers probably think life is better as an opposition party with no accountability," he wrote. He went on to sharply criticize them as people who "prefer the comfortable life of a slave over the responsible life of a free citizen even after the state removed the slave-plantation owner who staged a rebellion" — people who "keep pledging loyalty to pro-Japanese collaborators in a liberated country, people who would thrive even under Kim Jong-un's rule, people who wear the mask of conservatism while selling out liberal democracy."

Cho said there were two reasons the conservative party had "fallen to the margins of dynamic Korea — where roughly 70 percent of the public respects the constitution, facts and common sense — clinging to survival while longing for past glory." He identified those reasons as "a servile dependence on the United States and the abandonment of self-reliant national defense, and the corruption of the Korean language through hangul-only policy, which has destroyed the foundation of civic culture and reduced the party to a soulless, zombie-like existence." He added that "a conservative party that has erased national security — a matter of life and death — from its political agenda is a fake," and wrote that the PPP "shows symptoms of serious mental illness, infected by conspiracy theories that have crept into its laziness and cowardice — a party that cannot even pledge to build a nuclear missile defense shield, let alone pursue an independent nuclear deterrent, and appears to lack even the courage to dissolve itself."


cook@heraldcorp.com