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JULY 12, 2004
Chun Jung Bae Parliamentary Leader, Uri Party, South Korea Few campaign operatives can boast that they saved the political bacon of a president twice. But Chun Jung Bae can confidently make that claim. It was Chun who started rallying support behind maverick politician Roh Moo Hyun's bid for the presidency and helped organize the youth campaign that ended with Roh's surprise victory in the December, 2002, balloting. And it was Chun again who led this year's legislative campaign that brought Roh's Uri Party up from a small minority to a majority in parliament. Now the 49-year-old, three-term lawmaker finds himself the head of the ruling party's congressional bloc and in a strong position to completely revamp South Korea's graft-infested political system. Chun is a unique political breed in Korea. He doesn't have the charisma of former Presidents Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, whose dominating influence allowed them to run their political parties like their own fiefdoms. Chun is also too old to belong to the so-called "386" generation that took to the streets as student activists in the 1980s to fight for democracy against military dictatorship. (The "3" refers to their status as thirty-somethings, the "8" to their university days in the 1980s and the "6" to the 1960s, when most of them were born.) But when it comes to upholding political principles and pushing for institutional change, Chun is second to none. His refusal to compromise with the corrupt political establishment spurred reform-oriented lawmakers to rally around him in May to elect him as the party's parliamentary leader. Chun's reformist zeal dates back to the 1970s, when he graduated with a law degree from Seoul National University. After he served the required three years in the military, as a legal officer, he decided not to pursue a career as a state prosecutor or judge because he didn't want to be a civil servant in the dictatorial regime of Chun Doo Hwan, who seized power in a 1979 coup. So he joined a law firm instead. His work defending dissidents and union members in the 1980s and early 1990s caught the attention of Kim Dae Jung, who recruited him to politics. Chun won his first parliamentary term in 1996. But his reform campaign really picked up during his reelection campaign in 2000 when he promised to push for the ouster of old-guard politicians with incestuous ties to South Korea's big conglomerates, or chaebol. Later, Chun spearheaded the revision of party rules requiring that presidential candidates be selected by the electorate through primaries, instead of letting party bosses choose the torchbearer -- a practice that spawned sleazy backroom deals. Roh was an immediate beneficiary of that change when he won the primary and ran for president under the banner of the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) in 2002, with Chun's strong backing. With reformist Roh at the presidential Blue House, Chun led a group of 37 lawmakers last September to quit the MDP and set up the Uri Party. Uri went on to win 152 seats in the 299-member National Assembly in April. "Even if we hadn't got the majority, we would have made a big stride toward cleaning up politics," says Chun. His goal: to use Uri's mandate to further scrub up political campaigns and fight bureaucratic corruption. 
BW MALL
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