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Turn your gaze abroad and two conservative parties stand in stark contrast. Britain’s Conservative Party suffered a stunning collapse — losing power after 14 years in office following the 2024 general election. By contrast, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party won a landslide in the House of Representatives election held on the 8th of last month, securing a record number of seats and further entrenching one-party dominance. It captured 316 of the 465 seats, comfortably surpassing the 310-seat threshold required to propose constitutional amendments.
These two examples offer an existential lesson for South Korea’s conservative movement: adapt or perish. The Conservatives’ downfall began not merely with a change of government but with the loss of what it meant to be conservative. The 2016 Brexit vote opened fault lines that eventually pushed the 190-year-old party toward internal civil war. Over the course of its rule, the party went through five prime ministers. Voters gradually lost faith in its core strengths — competence and stability. The chaos surrounding former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s erratic tax-cut proposal triggered a collapse in the pound and market turmoil, branding the party as incompetent and convincing many that it had damaged the British economy.
Is it only my impression that the People Power Party is following a similar arc to the British Conservatives? The party remains mired in unresolved internal conflict and clings to the past instead of reading the times. Its inability to present a clear vision — a disappearance of competence — has even driven traditional supporters away. If the People Power Party resists change and maintains a reactionary stance like that of the British Conservatives, it risks repeating their tragic outcome.
By contrast, the LDP’s landslide is a textbook case of how a conservative party should evolve. The LDP weathered serious scandals, including slush-fund allegations, yet each time it activated self-cleansing mechanisms. It even took the drastic step of dismantling factions. Through efforts to win back disappointed voters, the party signaled a genuine willingness to change and focused on policies closely tied to everyday life.
The LDP’s decisive victory rested on its image as an effective problem-solver for daily concerns. Faced with national challenges such as rising prices and rapid population aging, the party set aside ideological battles and presented concrete measures — cutting food consumption taxes and boosting household incomes, for example.
The LDP also accepted opposition proposals that benefited people’s livelihoods without hesitation. Although Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is often classified as a hardline conservative, she adopted a pragmatic approach on bread-and-butter issues. Voters trusted the LDP not out of blind loyalty but because they saw it as the most capable force to govern.
Koreans, too, want competent leadership that can untangle the complex political challenges facing the country. With the ruling party’s three bills that undermine judicial independence now enacted, the main opposition must survive by offering concrete alternatives and persuading public opinion. It should propose real judicial protections to counter the criminalization of legal interpretation and the emergence of a de facto four-instance review system. The opposition must relentlessly document, with case-based evidence, how the ruling party’s measures infringe on citizens’ right to a fair trial and cause judicial delays. By presenting genuine reform proposals that speed up trials and provide tangible help to citizens, the party can demonstrate it is a competent force worthy of trust.
The lessons from Britain’s Conservatives and Japan’s LDP are clear for South Korea’s main opposition. To avoid falling off a cliff, the party must choose a path that ensures survival.
First, across democracies, a conservative party’s defining asset is the public belief that it gets things done. It must show competence on livelihoods and the economy. If it remains mired in partisan conflict while failing to address high inflation and mounting small-business closures, it has no future.
Second, the British Conservatives collapsed more from internal division than from external attack. The People Power Party should learn the LDP’s strategic flexibility — insisting on reform in times of crisis — and actively expand its appeal to centrists and younger voters.
Politics is, ultimately, the art of taking responsibility. The British Conservatives were abandoned because they shirked that responsibility. The LDP survived by proving, through continuous change, that it was a party that takes responsibility. If the People Power Party cannot overcome its current crisis and follows the path of the British Conservatives, the result will be more than the fall of a single party — it would be a blow to a pillar of Korean democracy.
Preserving values and traditions matters, but safeguarding them requires constant innovation and change. In short, conservatives should not be defenders of tradition for its own sake; they must keep evolving to protect those values. That is how they survive. Will they follow the LDP’s relentless survival instinct, or will they take the complacent path to self-destruction walked by the British Conservatives? That choice will determine the fate of South Korea’s conservative movement. Time is running out.
Kim Dong-won (former central party spokesperson, People Power Party; head of the Heungdeok District party branch, Cheongju)
※The opinions expressed in this column may differ from the newspaper’s views.
