Where does a movement go when the public can't move?

April 15: South Korea Parliamentary Elections

To much of the South Korean public, parliamentary elections scheduled for April 15 are barely visible. Most news is still full of coronavirus stories—there are nearly 10,000 cases in South Korea— and president Moon Jae-in has vowed to “keep a distance” from the elections by focusing all his energies on the pandemic. 

Thanks to the government’s aggressive testing and tracking efforts, South Korea’s infection rates have been falling for the past two weeks. Unlike in many major cities outside Korea, no businesses have been shut down and movement is free. But social distancing is still highly recommended. For election campaigners, that means relying heavily on the country’s fast internet to spread the word. 

“We would’ve had to campaign online anyway. We don’t have enough money for an offline campaign,” laughed Kim Jina, a representative of the Women’s Party, which is the country’s first-ever party to focus solely on policies related to women’s rights. We spoke at Woolf Social Club, Kim’s feminist bookstore and cafe in Seoul.

For the Women’s Party, which was launched this February, the internet is the preferred battleground. Twitter hashtags are the lingua franca. Around 90 percent of the party’s 10,000 or so members are women under 40. They are online-savvy, loud, and ready to dismantle the toxic masculinity of a society currently in the throes of yet another digital sex crime scandal. 

It isn’t easy being a feminist in Korea. Legendary is the story of Kim Jayeon, a voice actress who was fired in 2016 for posting a picture of herself in a shirt that said “Girls Do Not Need a Prince.” In 2017, an elementary school teacher made national headlines for being bullied online, after coming out as a feminist in a viral video. Most women have experienced this sort of discrimination firsthand. A potential employer once offered me a job only to retract it when an investor reportedly complained about my feminist writing. 

Too often in South Korea, feminism is seen as an uncomfortable subject. In some industries, like video games, it is taboo. 

“We’re so beyond all that,” said Kim, referring to the backlash and prejudice against women’s movements in Korea. “Many of us are veteran fighters.” Kim is one of seven party leaders (not all seeking election), each representing their own age group, from adolescence to women in their sixties.

The Women’s Party was formed almost literally overnight. A team of women gathered over 6,000 members nationwide, qualifying the group to register as an official political party, in less than a month. Young keyboard warriors rallied behind unified hashtags to keep the Women’s Party trending on Twitter. 

“Our member stats send a clear message,” Lee Jiwon, a party leader in her twenties, said. Most members are young women like her.  “Establishment politics is silencing women. The average age in the current National Assembly is 55.5. Women lawmakers make up only 17%,” she says. We need another way to represent our voices.” 

The Women’s Party vows to be an alternative to Korea’s older, male-dominated politics. Three out of four of the party’s candidates up for election are women in their twenties to thirties. As part of its top ten agenda, the party promises to provide safer housing for women, alleviate the gender pay gap, and ensure that women’s careers aren’t interrupted by childcare—for example, by imposing stricter penalties on companies that don’t guarantee paternity leave (still a stigmatized practice in Korea). 

“We’re ready to work together with other parties, as long as we can agree on the policies for women,” Kim said. “The Women’s Party doesn’t have a left or a right.”

The Women’s Party rides the wave of Korea’s revised election law, under which parties who gather the bare minimum can now gain more than one seat in the National Assembly, as opposed to just one seat prior to 2019. This revision hopes to strengthen minor parties against the traditionally two-party system. In the last parliamentary election, in 2016, the Democrats and the conservative United Future Party (then Liberty Korea) took over 80 percent of 300 seats. 

Since the revision, numerous minor parties have formed around specific agendas, including women’s rights climate change, basic universal income, and North Korean defectors.

The Women’s Party’s most prominent agenda item is tackling digital sex crime, a primary concern of its younger base. South Korea is festering with dark, unregulated online spaces where videos of women filmed secretly or through blackmail are shared as pornography. The crimes don’t stop online; sometimes live rape is streamed online for male users to comment on, like a sports game. 

The most recent scandal, for which the Women’s Party has a special task force, centers around the messaging app Telegram, where illegal photos and videos of women are produced and shared by men. The victims are often blackmailed into sending their naked bodies by men threatening to release the women’s personal information. Many of the victims are underage. 

“Young women are at the forefront of protests [about women’s rights],” said Kim. “In Korea, feminism is connected directly to their safety and survival.” 

To someone like Lee Seongsuk, a veteran feminist in her sixties, the Twitterspeak and digital experiences of young feminists probably feel like a foreign movie. But at the party’s official launch on March 8, Lee stood alongside other party members young enough to have never known a world without the internet. The party launch, which took place on International Women’s Day, was one of the few offline events the Women’s Party organized; so far, most of the party’s activities have taken place through social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube.

Lee’s generation struggled against a society that legally treated women as second-class citizens. Under the hoju legal system, which was abolished only in 2005, only men were allowed to be the officially recognized head of each family. Women were systematically discriminated against or silenced by the legal and financial systems when fighting for property rights or bank loans.

“There’s a huge generational gap between older feminists and those in their teens and twenties,” admitted Kim. “There’s a huge diversity of women within the party. But it’s precisely these differences that show why the Women’s Party has been made, why we came together. Individual differences aren’t that important.”

It remains to be seen how effectively the Women’s Party will represent the diversity of women’s voices in Korea, especially when the overwhelming majority of its support base is concentrated in the younger generations, whose lives and languages differ drastically from women like Lee Seongsuk or even Kim Jina, who is in her forties. The party has not taken a particular stance on issues around sexuality and gender, including whether to ally with LGBT groups. 

“We don’t have some unifying feminist ideology or value system,” said Kim. “We focus on specific current issues affecting Korean women. Overcoming differences is part of the process. We need to look at the bigger picture, of what we want to achieve together.” 

The party currently has around 10,000 registered members and needs at least 3 percent of the popular vote—over 1 million votes in a country of 51 million—to be able to seat candidates in parliament. It’s not clear how much support the party can gather through a campaign that runs primarily on social media. 

And 3 percent of the popular vote may be a higher barrier than it seems. “Bi-party politics is still very much alive in South Korea,” said Jang Seok-jun, a researcher at the Global Political Economy Institute. “The political formula still stands, where people vote for the Democratic Party to go against the [conservative] party,” and vice versa. 

The Women’s Party may have a vocal gathering on social media platforms like Twitter, but nationally, in much of the mainstream media, the spotlight is on the president and his ruling party, the Democrats. 

Moon’s party has faced corruption scandals, as well as a sluggish economy and stagnant relations with North Korea. In a strange twist, Korea’s coronavirus epidemic might be Moon’s saving grace: his approval rating recently rose to 55 percent, the highest in over a year. Supporters cite  his response to the virus as the most important factor in their approval 

Despite an uphill climb to parliamentary representation, the very existence of the Women’s Party signals the start of something new in South Korean politics. And that makes the heart flutter, even if just a little.