SEOUL -- Anniversaries are a good time to pause and ask: Where have we been successful and where have we failed? Looking at the past critically is a precondition for avoiding mistakes in the future.
Anniversaries are generally also occasions for celebration. I am not sure, however, whether the members of South Korea's local councils are in a festive mood these days. They do have a reason to celebrate: It is exactly 10 years since the first democratic elections for local councils ended a 30-year-suspension of local autonomy imposed by authoritarian rulers. But it is clear that not all hopes for democracy on the local level have been met since municipal elections were revived. Today, there is even talk of a crisis of local government in South Korea, and some political circles are floating schemes aimed at turning back the clock, abolishing what little local autonomy has been won in the past decade.
The local councils may well be the weakest element of South Korea's local-autonomy system. They are confronted with myriad problems. The main complaint of the approximately 5,500 South Korean councilmen and -women representing the population in the two-tier-system of local government is their obvious lack of political power. "Local councils should be the center of local autonomy," says Kim Yong Rae, a former mayor of Seoul, adding that this is obviously not the case today.