The Democratic Labor Party (DLP) was a left-wing nationalist political party in South Korea. It was founded in January 2000, in the effort to create a political wing for the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and was considered more left-wing and more independent of the two union federations in South Korea. Its party president was Lee Jung-hee and its assembly leader Kang Gi-gap, who is twice-elected congressman. In December 2011, the party merged into the Unified Progressive Party.
The party gained 10 seats in the National Assembly for the first time in the 2004 parliamentary election. Before and during the 2007 presidential election, conflicts arose between the two main factions within the party. While the "equality" faction, represented by the People's Democracy group, stressed social welfare and civil liberties, the "autonomy" faction, represented by the National Liberation group, emphasized anti-Americanism and good relationships with North Korea.
After the 2007 presidential election, the People's Democracy faction quit the party and formed the New Progressive Party (NPP). Despite that split, DLP gained 5 seats in the National Assembly in the 2008 election, but NPP gained none. In the 2009 election, NPP got one seat. On 5 December 2011, the party merged with the People's Participation Party and a faction of the NPP to found the Unified Progressive Party.
Famous quotes containing the words democratic, labor and/or party:
“As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature’s elementary materials.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The newspaper reader says: this party is destroying itself through such mistakes. My higher politics says: a party that makes such mistakes is finished—it has lost its instinctive sureness.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)