Green Party of Korea

The Green Party of Korea pursues to be a party where grass-roots take leading roles, supporting decentralization with various democratic principles including the direct democracy system and lottery system, realizing equality from itself, reflecting minorities’ opinions including women, the disabled, emigrant, youth, and with low threshold for everyone to participate in. 

The party is more concerned with the process and communication than effectiveness in discussion and tries to respect minorities’ opinions as much as possible regardless of the cases that majority decisions are inevitable. We respect autonomies of each lay party member even though we have to follow majority decision. We try to make more than 50% of ratio of women when forming all representative bodies and committees. We guarantee that the disabled, youth and monitories account for more than a certain ratio or number to expand their participation in political activities.

Structure

Green Party of Korea is an alliance of independent regional parties. 

Each entity is independent in its decision-making process and activities and shares its goals and values with Green Party Korea including ecological wisdom, social justice, grass-roots democracy, non-violence peace, continuity and respecting diversity. 

Green Party of Korea is made up of grass roots and various gathering among party members. The groups include youths, vegetarians, animal welfare and regions. 

There is a steering committee as a legislative body for general affairs. The committee consists of common chairperson, secretary general, regional chairperson, chairperson for preparatory committee to turn into a political party, 1 out of 100 party members in local governments and youth party gathering representative.

The Green Party national secretariat functions as the center for network and communication with each regional party, different from other parties’ central party where all powers are concentrated.

Until the Birth

The preparatory committee for Green Party of Korea was founded in Oct 30, 2011. 

A politic party can be created only if there are more than 1000 party members in 5 cities in provinces each in accordance with the Korea’s Political Party Act. Already, a lot of people agreed the values of green and implemented the concept in their lifestyle. The power of acting citizens showed infinite possibility from various times.

The initiator ceremony for a new “Green Party” was held on Oct 30, followed by November 5 in Gyeonggi-do, November 11 in Seoul and November 17 in Busan. Then, Jeju-island, Chungcheongnam-do and Daegu City followed the trend.

Each region started mustering party members from scratch and finally, Gyeonggi-do held the inauguration ceremony in February 5, 2012 as the first cities and provinces party then in Seoul on February 12.The next inauguration ceremonies followed in Busan City on February 14, in Daegu City on February 23 and in Choongcheongnam-do on February 26. And the national Green Party inauguration ceremony eventually was held on March 4, 2012! It was the moment that the real green politics taking care of regions and minorities was about to start.

Afterwards, the Green Party of Korea has actively performed activities including participation in 2012 general election with 3 proportional representatives under 3 subjects: non-nuclear, agriculture, life and by regional district candidates in Gijang-Eul, Busan City and in Yeongduk,Yeongyang, Bonghwa, Uljin, Gyeongsangbuk-do where nuclear power stations are placed. The party obtained about 100,000 votes in total, accounting for 0.48% of the total votes, resulting in the fact that the registration as a political party was terminated. However, we immediately undertook activities for re-foundation and continue preparation for forming the party after report of preparatory committee on April 26, 2012 with the new name of Green Party+(plus/더하기, which also means "do more" in Korean). At last, we re-launched Green Party of Korea successfully on the date of 13th October 2012.

We continue to realize the world of peace of life and non-nuclear with wider perspective and more passion from the previous experience.

We will move forward with true heart but not desperately as if we sprout a new bud in spring 2012 with cooperative study and discussion.

National Green Party Status (As of Oct 13, 2012)

The followings are where initiator ceremonies were held with more than 100 people:

• Incheon Green Party(Preparatory Committee) : incheongreens@gmail.com
• Jeju Green Party(Preparatory Committee) : jgparty@daum.net
• Gyoungnam Green Party(Preparatory Committee) : greenpartygn@daum.net
• Gyoungbuk Green Party(Preparatory Committee) : gbgreenparty@daum.net