What does Project Esther aim to achieve?
Where the candidates stand on the martial law attemptLee, the opposition leader, has also proposed constitutional changes to introduce a four-year, two-term presidency – at the moment, South Korean presidents are only allowed a single term of five years. Lee has also argued for a run-off system for presidential elections, whereby if no candidate secures 50 percent of the popular vote, the top two candidates take on each other in a second round.
“A four-year, two-term presidency would allow for a midterm evaluation of the administration, reinforcing responsibility,” he wrote on Facebook, calling for a constitutional amendment to enable the change. “Meanwhile, adopting a run-off election system would enhance the legitimacy of democratic governance and help reduce unnecessary social conflict.”The PPP’s Kim has accepted Lee’s proposals for a constitutional amendment to allow a two-term presidency, but has suggested shortening each term to three years.Yoon’s martial law bid, however, has left the PPP in crisis and
Infighting plagued the embattled party as it tried to choose the impeached president’s successor. Although Kim won the party primary, its leaders tried to replace him with former Prime Minister Han Duck-soo. On the eve of the party’s campaign launch, they cancelled Kim’s candidacy, only to reinstate him after party members opposed the move.Bong, at Yonsei University, said the infighting as well as divisions in the conservative camp over Yoon’s decree has cost it support.
“Kim Moon-soo has not set his position clearly on the martial law declaration,” Bong said. “He has not distanced himself from the legacy of Yoon, but at the same time, he has not made it clear whether he believes the declaration of martial law was a violation of the constitution. So the PPP has not really had enough energy to mobilise its support bases.”
Still, Kim appears to have eroded what was a more than 20 percent point gap with Lee at the start of the campaign.“What we’re seeing right now is a struggle between two Zionist elites over who is the greater fascist in different forms,” Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, a professor at Tel Aviv University, said of the political struggles at play within Israel.
“On the one hand, there are the Ashkenazi Jews, who settled Israel, imposed the occupation and have killed thousands,” he said of Israel’s traditional military and governing elites, many of whom might describe themselves as liberal and democratic, and were originally from central and Eastern Europe. “Or [you have] the current religious Zionists, like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who [the old Ashkenazi elite] now accuse of being fascists.“You can’t reduce this to left and right. I don’t buy into that,” Shenhav-Shahrabani said. “It goes deeper. Both sides are oblivious to the genocide in Gaza.”
While resistance against the war has grown both at home and abroad, so too has the intensity of the attacks being protested against.Since Israel unilaterally broke a