Will there come the first university student representative of Korea? Last Feb. 23, Lee Ju-hee (Seoul National Univ., 3) announced that she was going to run for the 17th General Elections as a proportional representative of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), setting a record as the first student to ever run for the elections. If the DLP receives 15.3 percent of the vote, she will automatically become the youngest lawmaker in the history of Korean congress.
Reporter (R): Why did you decide to run for the elections?
Lee (L): I have been in student activism for seven years now. So politics is not something that sporadically came out of my head, but something I have been wanting to do for almost 10 years. Then, a new revelation came last year. I was standing in front of the National Assembly with hundreds of people who were against sending Korean troops to Iraq. Yet not one of us could stop the congress from passing the bill. I realized that if I wanted to make a difference, I needed the power.
R: As a university representative candidate, how do you plan to approach student related issues?
L: First of all, I hope to solve the problem of hiking tuition fees. Many private universities are implicated in fiscal corruptions. I plan to enact a special bill to bring transparency in managing the school funds. I would also like to address the problem of high unemployment rate, limited suffrage, and general awareness of the student issues.
R: How do you plan to reach university students who are said to be apathetic to politics?
L: I think the conception that students do not care for politics is just an illusion that the media and the politicians created to keep the status quo. Remember the World Cup, candlelight vigils, anti-war demonstrations and most recently the anti-impeachment movement. It was young people who were in the middle of all this. They have all this built-up energy inside, just waiting for an exit, and I think that my role is to provide motivation for them. Students should gain their right to speak out their opinions and let their voices be heard.
espirit0121@ewha.ac.kr
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