Ex-GNP Chairman Says Coalition Needed

Former Grand National Party Chairman Lee Hoi-chang said yesterday that rightist parties must form a coalition to fend against the possibility of a third straight leftist ruling party.

While attending a breakfast meeting held by the Far East Forum in Sejong Center in Jongno-gu, Seoul, Lee explained that the presidential elections in 2007 would be a battle between leftist forces that support North Korea and non-leftist parties. He said that the leftist administration should be halted and that democratic forces should regain power.

He said that the administration’s schemes of dividing 20 percent of the country as the wealthy and the other 80 percent of the nation as the poor remind him of the ways of how communists used the class battle by urging the “proletariat to unite.”

He raised his pitch by saying that the administration only started calling themselves leftist neo-liberals and adopting few rightist policies after they realized that their leftist policies were not working.

It was the first time that Lee spoke in a public lecture since he retired from politics after a loss in a bid for the presidency in 2002.

Jung-Eun Lee lightee@donga.com