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NKOREA-POLITICS-VOTE
Democracy, DPRK style: North Korea holds election
PYONGYANG, March 10, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – North Koreans go to the polls Sunday
for an election in which there can be only one winner.
Leader Kim Jong Un’s ruling Workers’ Party has an iron grip on the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the isolated, nuclear-armed country
is officially known.
But every five years it holds an election for the rubber stamp
legislature, known as the Supreme People’s Assembly.
And in keeping with one of Pyongyang’s most enduring slogans — “Single-
minded unity” — there is only one approved name on each of the ballot
papers.
Voters have the opportunity to cross it out before casting their ballot,
but in practice that is unknown.
Turnout last time was 99.97 percent, according to the official KCNA news
agency — only those who were abroad or “working in oceans” did not take
part. And the vote was 100 percent in favour of the named candidates.
“We regard all the people in our country as one family so we will unite
with one mind and we will vote for the agreed candidate,” Socialist Women’s
Union official Song Yang Ran, 57, told AFP ahead of this year’s poll.
Ordinary North Koreans always express total support for the authorities
when speaking to foreign media.
“Our system is the best,” Song said when asked her opinion of elections
that have several names on the ballot paper.
“We acknowledge no one but the Supreme Leader,” she added, referring to
Kim Jong Un.
“And we will hold the respected Marshal in high esteem forever.”
– Ritual exercise –
With a total absence of electoral competition, analysts say the vote is
held largely as a political rite to enable the authorities to claim a mandate
from the people.
It was the result of “established institutional inertia and a need to
legitimise the government by simulating democratic procedure”, said Andrei
Lankov of Korea Risk Group.
Soviet-style Communist states had a long tradition of holding general
elections, he said, even if the ruling party ignored its own rules about
holding regular congresses — something the North skipped for more than 30
years.
“North Korea is just emulating all other Communist states,” he said.
“The early Communists sincerely believed that they were producing a
democracy the world had never seen. So they needed elections and it became a
very important part of self-legitimisation.”
The last significant government of a major country to dispense with
elections altogether was Nazi Germany, he pointed out.
The North is divided into constituencies for the vote — there were 686 at
the last election in 2014, when Kim stood in Mount Paektu, a dormant volcano
on the border with China revered as the spiritual birthplace of the Korean
people.
He received a 100 percent turnout and 100 percent in favour according to
KCNA.
Some of the seats are allocated to two minor parties, the Korean Social
Democratic Party and the Chondoist Chongdu Party, which has its roots in a
20th century Korean religious movement.
They are both in a formal alliance with the ruling party and analysts and
diplomats say they exist largely on paper, with only small central offices
maintained for propaganda purposes.
Even so, participation in the poll, like other “obligatory rituals” in the
North, does reinforce loyalty to the government and social unity, Lankov
said, “because humans love symbolism”.
In an article headlined “Superior Election System of DPRK”, KCNA said the
vote was an important occasion “displaying the solidity and invincibility of
the socialist system in which the leader, the party and the masses form a
harmonious whole”.
BSS/AFP/MSY/0851 hrs