The upside-down world of North Korean elections

There is only one choice on a North Korean ballot paper. Voters drop their ballot into one of two boxes — white for “Yes”, and black for “No” — but “No” has never won. 

North Koreans had no option but to vote in local elections held in the east Asian dictatorship on Sunday. But while the results were preordained, the process serves as an important ritual binding the people to the regime. North Korea holds regional elections every four years, but only allows a single candidate to stand in each district.

“The logic is that we help to strengthen the regime by acting and voting for those who are loyal to the party,” says Ahn Chan-il, a North Korean escapee who now heads the World Institute for North Korea Studies. “It didn’t occur to us that the electoral system might be weird — we thought it was natural for only one person to stand.”

Those who are “elected” serve in rubber-stamp bodies that only meet a few days a year. The North Korean regime has historically used elections as a pretext to restrict internal movement, track the whereabouts of citizens who may have left their local area without permission and intensify compulsory “political education” sessions.

Elections also hold propaganda value. “This is not about being democratic,” says Rachel Minyoung Lee, a North Korea expert and non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center think-tank in Washington. “This is about trying to seem to the world like a more ‘normal state’ while showing its own people that it is trying to change for the better.”

The North Korean election process is undergoing some changes itself. Under reforms revealed by state media in October the candidates in some districts were selected via a primary-like process, in which two people who are supposed to represent different regions, professions and genders can ostensibly compete for support. The new system, which remains highly opaque, hints at the possibility of slightly greater citizen participation in the selection of local-level officials in one of the world’s most repressive countries.

The North Korean authorities also acknowledged this week that in a handful of very rare instances, some people appear to have actually voted “No”. According to state media, 0.09 per cent voted against candidates for provincial councils, and 0.13 per cent against city council candidates.

Andrei Lankov, a professor of history at Kookmin University in Seoul, stresses that whatever their real feelings, North Korean voters have no incentive to cast a “No” vote. “If you vote ‘No’ you are likely to be seen as a subversive element, and no matter how people vote, the declared result will be the same,” he says.

But while Kim Jong Un’s electoral reforms do little to facilitate democratic participation, they are consistent with his efforts to overhaul the country’s governance — and its image. Lee notes that under Kim’s father, the Workers’ Party of Korea had withered as it came to revolve around the whims of the leader. Kim the younger, by contrast, has sought to restore collective decision-making and revitalise the party’s internal structures 

That involves the leader being seen to take a step back. Kim did not stand in 2019 elections for the Supreme People’s Assembly, the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, a first for a North Korean ruler. He was also reported by state media not to have given a speech at a major WPK plenum he attended in June this year, something described by South Korea’s unification ministry as “highly unprecedented”.

The millennial dictator has also warned his propagandists not to make wildly exaggerated claims about his talents, instead playing up his humility and responsiveness to the people’s needs. “In the name of highlighting [the leader’s] greatness, we end up hiding the truth,” he wrote in 2019.

“With his reforms, Kim is trying to create the image of a single-party rather than a single-person regime,” says Peter Ward, a fellow at the University of Vienna’s European Centre for North Korean Studies. “That allows him to distance himself from failure, while also making the regime look less ridiculous.”

christian.davies@ft.com