'Citizens, Not Protesters,' They Said — Yet Shouts Over 'Plants' Erupt

A new style of rally led by the generation in their 20s and 30s is emerging, breaking from the ideology- and organization-centered grammar of collective action long practiced by the so-called "86 generation." While participants tout voluntary involvement through social networking services (SNS) and the absence of political coloring as strengths, the conflicts and fractures among them — including a failure to speak with a single voice — are cited as challenges to overcome.

Around the handball stadium at Olympic Park, where the ballot boxes from the No. 2 polling station in Jamsil 7-dong, Seoul, are stored, citizens demanding a re-election kept watch through the night, when the Seoul Economic Daily visited Sunday. The crowd, unofficially estimated by police at around 8,000 in the early morning hours, shrank to about 1,000 by around 8:40 a.m. as many of the 2030 generation members who had led the protest left for their weekday commutes. Even so, a considerable number remained on site, continuing chants to block the removal of the ballot boxes and to denounce the election commission.

The most distinctive feature of this rally was that "solo participants" made up the majority. Many of the citizens at the scene were people in their 20s and 30s who joined in an individual capacity after learning of the rally through SNS such as Instagram. This differed from previous rallies, in which a particular political force or organization mobilized supplies and personnel and asserted the group's presence through flags, picket signs and buses. At the scene there were no unified picket signs or official guidelines, nor were there action directives such as "until when, and how many should gather" — most was left to individual judgment.

A top-down structure in which people move according to instructions from leadership was also hard to find. Participants ran the site in a "volunteer" manner. Tasks such as clearing trash or maintaining order around the entrances were carried out voluntarily without separate command.

Experts analyze that this form of rally emerged as the political purity of the 2030 generation combined with the spreading power of SNS. Song Jae-ryong, a distinguished professor of sociology at Kyung Hee University, explained, "Whereas older generations have made political judgments centered on their interests, the 2030 generation tends strongly to move according to its own sense of right and wrong," adding, "Because of this, their aversion to 'professional political operators' is also strong."

The limits, however, were also clear. With no executive body overseeing the rally, conflicts large and small that arose on site were exposed as they were. Indeed, around 10 a.m., when members of the women's youth national handball team requested to move, saying they needed to retrieve equipment for training, a scuffle briefly broke out between protest participants and police. In particular, when the players came out with their equipment, some participants surrounded them and blocked their way, saying it had to be checked for items related to the election commission. In the process, some participants said they should clear the path, but others pushed back, saying, "We haven't even checked properly, so why are you letting them through as you please?" — and shouts of "If you're not a 'plant,' then prove it" were exchanged.

Over time, groups with political coloring also flowed in. Early on, there was a strong atmosphere of allowing only the Korean national flag (Taegukgi) in order not to reveal any particular political leaning, but by Sunday morning, participants holding American flags were also visible in various spots on site. In fact, on a notice board posted with rally guidelines near the Jamsil vote-counting site, the phrase "please wave only the Taegukgi" had a correction mark struck through it, with the phrase "American flags permitted" written over it, and some participants showed signs of objecting to this. After the 2030 generation participants returned to daily routines such as their commutes, conservative-leaning forces filled the vacancies, and a pattern emerged in which the problem awareness initially focused on denouncing poor election management expanded into political assertions.

Park Sang-cheol, a professor at the Graduate School of Political Science at Kyonggi University, diagnosed, "Issues tied to politics ultimately have no choice but to go through a process of politicization," adding, "A rally with weak cohesion is prone to being absorbed by existing parties or political forces, or to losing its continuity." Still, he said, "This rally demonstrated the possibility of a new form of political participation forming outside the existing political establishment."