'Selling the president's name was our only strategy,' Park Soo-hyun says in self-criticism after local election losses

Park Soo-hyun, who won the South Chungcheong governorship in Wednesday's local elections, acknowledged a failure of electoral strategy after his Democratic Party of Korea lost 10 of the province's 15 cities and counties to the People Power Party. He said the party had "set the wrong standard for reading public sentiment."

Writing on Facebook on Friday, Park said the Democratic Party had lost the race for local government chiefs. "In Buyeo-Cheongyang, my former constituency, we lost all three contests — including the National Assembly by-election — and even the county chief seats. It is deeply painful," he wrote. "Both the Buyeo and Cheongyang-gun chief races were lost by fewer than 100 votes."

He blamed himself squarely for the outcome. "It is my fault, my fault, my fault," he wrote, adding that the party should have read public sentiment on its own terms but instead operated with "President Lee Jae-myung as the one and only standard."

On the reasons for the defeat, Park acknowledged the party had offered no agenda to capture the hearts of residents. "I confess that our only electoral strategy was to trade on the name of a president with high approval ratings and wait for time to pass," he said.

He added that he had not anticipated such results when he entered the South Chungcheong governor's race. "The polling did not suggest this either. I was convinced we would easily win all the local chief seats in Gongju, Buyeo and Cheongyang, and expected comfortable victories in all but one or two of the remaining cities and counties," he said.

Park warned that the party's current trajectory did not bode well for the next presidential election. "If Oh Se-hoon — the Seoul mayor-elect — and Han Dong-hoon — the independent winner of the Busan Buk-gap National Assembly by-election — join forces to dismantle Jang Dong-hyeok's People Power Party and rebuild the conservative bloc, that would create a formidable political landscape," he said.

He reserved his sharpest warning for his own party. "An even more serious problem may lie within the Democratic Party itself," he said. "If the party refuses to reflect and instead turns the local election results into a factional brawl over the next leadership race, public sentiment will turn cold very quickly."

He added that such infighting would also place a heavy burden on President Lee's governance. "What we must do now is sincerely look inward," he wrote. He questioned whether demanding the party leader and leadership resign was truly the best course of action, but said: "We need a new Democratic Party that takes responsibility properly. The answer is not 'your fault' but 'my fault.'"

Park also addressed outgoing Gov. Kim Tae-heum of the People Power Party, thanking him for his four years of service and pledging to work alongside residents toward "a newer South Chungcheong."