[Koo Bon-young Column] Angry 2030 in 'Your Paradise'

Is this the return of the "Angry Young Men"? Around the June 3 local elections, young people in their 20s and 30s have begun speaking up. They were once seen as politically indifferent. This time, however, they stepped in as swing voters at polling stations in battleground districts. In particular, they are leading the protest at Seoul Olympic Park over the unprecedented shortage of ballots. The self-organized mobilization of young people without any political center of gravity is a rare sight in Korean political history.
From the early stages of the campaign, a landslide victory for the ruling party had been widely expected. The only remaining question was whether the opposition, still floundering in the swamp of former President Yoon Suk-yeol's impeachment, could avoid a crushing defeat. But the result was unexpected. On the basis of metropolitan and provincial governors, the ruling party won 12 to 4, yet the Seoul Metropolitan City Mayor's office, a position with major political symbolism, went to the opposition. Election experts say the ruling party's proposal for a Special Counsel for Prosecutorial Dismissal triggered the upset. In other words, young and centrist voters turned away from what they saw as an unfair attempt to erase President Lee Jae-myung's legal risks.
Of course, it is difficult to judge an election campaign by a single factor. In the Seoul mayoral race, the punitive real estate tax system was the decisive variable. Before the election, President Lee moved to rein in housing prices by pressuring not only multi-home owners but also single-home owners who did not live in the property. Yet sale prices, jeonse deposits, and monthly rents all rose, hitting low-income earners and young people directly. Those trapped by lending restrictions were left in a "monthly-rent hell." Whatever the variable, the election result cannot be explained without the anger of young voters.
The current administration was deeply committed to boosting the KOSPI. But for young people, it is merely "Your Paradise," the title of a novel by Lee Cheong-jun. In the novel, the islanders remained skeptical of the warden's proposal to create a utopia through large-scale land reclamation. They could not believe that a life cut off from the mainland could be a true paradise. In today's reality, what people in their 20s and 30s really want is stable jobs, not a stock-market windfall. Unlike those in their 40s and 50s, they do not even have seed money to invest. The fact that campaign-style policies such as cash handouts for young people or expanded health insurance coverage for hair-loss treatment failed to resonate follows the same logic. They know these measures will eventually come back as a burden on their own future.
That does not mean people in their 20s and 30s are especially supportive of the People Power Party. Exit polls confirmed that many of them chose Oh Se-hoon over Jung Won-oh, the candidate backed by President Lee for Seoul mayor. But at a rally in Jamsil, young people chanted "by-election" and "guarantee voting rights," while also showing a clear desire to keep their distance from People Power Party figures such as party leader Jang Dong-hyuk, who visited the scene.
Still, it is true that they are not friendly toward the Lee Jae-myung administration. Look at the trend in recent polls. According to the National Barometer Survey (NBS) released on the 11th by Embrain Public, Kstat Research, Korea Research International, and Hankook Research, support for the Democratic Party among those aged 18 to 19 (27%) and 30 to 39 (29%) was far lower than among people in their 40s (57%) and 50s (59%). A similar pattern appeared in Jo Won C&I's survey on the 17th assessing President Lee's state affairs performance. Positive ratings were dominant among people in their 40s (56.0%) and 50s (56.8%), but negative ratings were overwhelming among those in their 20s (32.0% positive, 61.4% negative) and 30s (34.6% positive, 64.9% negative).
This is an awkward point for the ruling camp, which believes it successfully cornered the opposition with the frame of insurrection. From a third-party perspective, however, it seems more like the consequence of failing to meet the standards of the 2030 generation, for whom fairness is the top value. After the self-destructive martial law fiasco, former President Yoon and his wife were already placed under arrest. Yet when the arrogance of the current administration came into view, the 2030 generation responded with the same yardstick it had used when it was angry at the Yoon administration. That explains why they answered the ruling party's proposal for a Special Counsel for Prosecutorial Dismissal with punitive voting, or took to the streets after the ballot shortage incident.
The unusual mobilization of people in their 20s and 30s may also be an expression of frustration with the hypocrisy of entrenched interests, regardless of party or ideology. One view, for example, is that "the young people who gathered at Seoul Olympic Park waving the Taegeukgi were expressing anger at an unfair society and the power monopolized by entrenched interests" said Professor Kang Won-taek. The 86 Group, a core force in the current administration, may once have been a democratization movement, but in the eyes of young people it is now just another vested-interest bloc. That is because the 2030 generation largely grew up during periods when the current ruling party was in power or held a majority.
Our society must now face the accumulated anger of the 2030 generation. It would be a mistake to think that raising soldiers' pay or introducing a selective conscription system will be enough to calm them. The polarization between generations, in both jobs and assets, is only going to deepen. Whether the ruling party or the opposition, the only way to find a solution is to recognize that, for young people, fairness is a matter of survival.
kby777@fnnews.com Reporter