The PPP's election autopsy painted a rosy picture. For its lawmakers, the party still needs resuscitation.

Just weeks after the June 3 local elections appeared to revive the People Power Party (PPP), the conservative opposition is again mired in internal feuding and leadership paralysis.

A week after the June 3 local elections, the PPP held a 44.3 percent approval rating, ahead of the ruling Democratic Party's (DP) 38 percent, according to a Realmeter poll surveyed through an automated response system.

The poll marked the first time the conservative party had overtaken the liberal party in public support since the Lee Jae Myung administration took office.

"If voters cast their ballots once again right now, we'd win,” the PPP said after the ratings were announced. 

Five weeks later, the political momentum had shifted again.

The pollster's survey from the third week of July put the DP back in front at 43.1 percent, while PPP trailed with a 40 percent approval rating.

The turnaround came despite a string of turbulence for the DP, including an increasingly acrimonious leadership race, controversy over a volatile stock market and renewed criticism of the government's housing policy.

Despite the opening, the PPP failed to capitalize.

Experts argue that the party's stagnation reflects three longstanding weaknesses: a lack of urgency, a lack of leadership and a lack of a compelling alternative.

"Even if the PPP outperformed expectations in some areas during the local elections, it still lost the election in any objective sense,” Lee Jae-mook, a political science professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, said. "No one acknowledged defeat or took responsibility. Once the party stopped admitting its defeat, it also lost any urgency to reinvent itself. That's where the PPP is today.”

The professor added that breaking free from the three absences should be the PPP's first priority for its rebound.

The party's own post-election autopsy reflects that mindset.

The conservative party released an internal assessment on June 21 portraying its performance as a success and praising party leader Jang Dong-hyeok for his extensive campaign efforts. The report offered no explanation regarding why the party surrendered 12 of the country's 16 metropolitan mayoral and gubernatorial races to the DP.

Demands for Jang's resignation, which emerged after the election from some first- and second-term lawmakers and members of a faction aligned with independent Rep. Han Dong-hoon, who previously helmed the party, have since quietly dissipated. Han is one of the leading conservative figures critical of former President Yoon Suk Yeol, while Jang remains one of the party's most prominent pro-Yoon figures.

"Instead of a sense of crisis, what's spreading through the party is this baseless optimism that if we simply hang on, we'll win the 2028 general election,” a second-term PPP lawmaker said.

Analysts say an even bigger problem is the absence of leadership capable of rebuilding and unifying the party.

Since joining a protest against what participants described as violations of voting rights related to ballot shortages in the local elections on June 5, Jang has spent nearly every day at the rallies in Seoul's Olympic Park, except during a brief hospitalization.

"Instead of serving as the party's pivot, Jang has all but isolated himself from fellow lawmakers while pursuing a one-man campaign of street politics,” a senior PPP lawmaker said.

The party has struggled just as much inside the National Assembly.

It sought to block a DP bill extending the second round of comprehensive special counsel investigations through a filibuster, but the effort was quashed after 24 hours on Tuesday.

On Thursday, PPP officials will hold another symbolic demonstration outside the parliament building. They are set to stand on ice blocks to call for the dissolution of the National Election Commission and oppose legislation abolishing the investigative authority of the prosecution.

But even within the party, such demonstrations are dismissed as political theater — attention-grabbing but unlikely to generate lasting momentum.

"Neither our street protests nor our parliamentary strategy is working,” a PPP lawmaker representing the Seoul metropolitan area said.

The absence of urgency and leadership has increasingly cast the party as an incompetent opposition, unable to present voters with either a clear vision or viable alternatives, experts argue.

"Can anyone point to a single policy or bill the PPP has introduced this year that clearly resonated with voters as a conservative answer on housing, the economy, social issues or national security?” Prof. Lee Hyeon-woo, a political scientist at Sogang University, said.

That assessment is now widely shared across the political spectrum. Unlike past conservative parties that shaped the national agenda with signature initiatives such as "economic democratization,” the PPP has struggled to offer a defining policy vision of its own.

Its most notable recent initiative came during the debate over prosecutorial investigative authority, when it proposed a party-backed amendment to the Criminal Procedure Act to preserve those powers. But without enough seats to pass legislation on its own, the bill's passage is unlikely.

The vacuum left by the party's failure to offer policy alternatives has instead been filled by factional infighting, with ethics investigations and disciplinary proceedings fueling internal divisions while appealing to its most hard-line supporters.

Its central ethics committee met again on Wednesday to review disciplinary cases involving dozens of lawmakers. The occasion fueled frustration inside the party.

"Is this really the time for politics by intimidation?” a senior PPP lawmaker said.

Analysts note that previous opposition parties confronted with existential crises responded very differently.

After the political backlash over the 2004 impeachment of former liberal President Roh Moo-hyun, Park Geun-hye, then the leader of the conservative Grand National Party, sought to reinvent the party by installing offices in tents along the street to signal repentance and a fresh start for the embattled conservatives. The strategy helped the party secure 121 seats in that year's general election and escape what many had viewed as the prospect of collapse.

The DP also broadened its appeal during the conservative Lee Myung-bak administration by unveiling the "New Democratic Party Plan” in 2009. The agenda emphasized inclusive growth and helped it regain centrist voters at a time when the progressive bloc was politically cornered.

Political analysts say the party must break out of a pattern of passively waiting for the government to stumble while tailoring its message to hard-line supporters.

"Past conservative reforms succeeded because they looked toward the political center and were flexible enough to adopt some of the strengths of the progressive camp, as they did with economic democratization,” said Lee Sun-woo, a political science professor at Jeonbuk National University. "A strategy built around hoping the government makes mistakes while speaking only to hard-line supporters is unlikely to produce a comeback.”

BY YANG SU-MIN [[email protected]]