The Mayor-Elect
During my years at the bottom of the political food chain, I had watched plenty of politicians get domesticated by the underlings beneath them. I had even seen a few get swallowed whole and used outright. And not one of them fell victim because he lacked the brains to see it coming.
Right. Nobody gets played just because he's an idiot.
The reason this occupied my mind was simple: as the mayor-elect of Maesan City, I now sat in exactly the kind of position that made a man look like easy prey. I was a hometown boy, technically, but I had built my entire career in Yeouido, which meant I had no local base to speak of. I was young for the job, too. The city employed Grade 9 clerks older than I was. To outside eyes, I was nothing more than a lucky parachute appointee. Worse, I was being mistaken for a well-meaning one.
The blame lay with reporters filing stories like this:
There was even a short-form clip making the rounds of me bent at a full ninety-degree bow, pleading with the late Pyeon Seongyeop to go to the hospital. In the eyes of Maesan's entrenched old guard, I must have looked like prime taming material.
Sure enough, by my fourth day as mayor-elect, the probing began.
"Ha ha, Mr. Mayor-Elect. You've been through the wringer with this campaign. By now, I trust you understand that politics doesn't end on election day. The orthodox play is to start preparing for your second term before the ink on your certificate of election has even dried."
He was the chairman of the Maesan Saemaul Association, one of the city's flagship government-aligned civic groups, and in his other life a construction-materials distributor. I had a fair guess why a man would raise the subject of reelection during a courtesy call.
"Go ahead. I'm listening."
"Ah... yes, sir. I don't know whether you're aware, but the senior associations, residents' councils, and neighborhood watch units threaded through the ten districts of Maesan's old downtown add up to thirty thousand members on their own. Why do you suppose every previous mayor sent those organizations' officers on overseas training trips each year and pressed hundreds of millions of won in subsidies into their hands?"
"I couldn't say."
"For their reelection campaigns, obviously! Why are you making me spell it out?"
He wasn't wrong. Worrying about the next election the moment you'd won the last one was every politician's instinct, and almost nobody elected to office wanted to stop at a single four-year term. That was why they worked so hard to tend the hometown associations, alumni networks, civic groups, and sports councils classified as vote banks back home. A machine like that genuinely paid off once you had it running... and that, in the end, was precisely what the Saemaul chairman across the desk was offering to build for me.
You've got no base. We'll build you one. So let's cooperate, shall we?
"You're a sharp young man. I take it you follow me?"
I followed, all right. I simply had no intention of striking deals on those terms. I sent him off with a courteous smile.
The next visitor's purpose was the same brand of probing. This time it was the chairman of the Maesan University Station Prosperity Committee, a gentleman who owned several buildings.
"Mr. Mayor!"
"Mayor-elect, technically."
"You'll be sworn in at the end of the month regardless. ...To tell you the truth, there were plenty of times I watched from the sidelines and ached for you. When the People's Choice leadership dumped you down here out of nowhere, running that campaign bare-knuckled without a penny of seed money, it must have felt like being ground to the bone."
"......"
"One election under your belt, and you're smiling on the outside while sitting on a mountain of debt worth hundreds of millions behind the scenes. That's this business, isn't it? A man can only keep his eye on governance once he can breathe. And frankly, that's the road to cleaner city administration, too."
So this one's about money.
Politics and money were two faces of the same coin, and honestly, I sometimes lost track of which face was heads. In my experience it was money, more often than not. The power of money was genuinely terrifying.
This guy thinks I'm strapped for cash.
Granted, an election was an event where you hemorrhaged money at an obscene rate. The statutory reimbursement from the National Election Commission covered only a fraction of what you actually spent, since money burned during the preliminary candidacy period and campaign office rent never came back at all.
"I'd imagine you spent somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred million won?"
"Ha ha. When you put a figure on the table that abruptly, I hardly know how I'm expected to react."
"I'm saving us both time. Maesan has two hundred thousand registered voters. During the preliminary campaign window alone, text blasts and printed materials will run you fifty to sixty million, and keeping a campaign office alive costs at least another twenty on top of that."
As I tossed out the rough arithmetic, the prosperity chairman gazed at me with something close to pity. Which told me everything I needed to know: this man hadn't given a damn about me until the general election.
"A hundred million. That's serious money for a young politician. There's a reason young people can't get a foot over the threshold of politics, and that's exactly what makes our mayor-elect stand out, of course."
A hundred million, my ass. My total unreimbursed spending had come in under twenty million. The secret was nothing exotic: during the preliminary candidacy period, I had done absolutely nothing. Back then I'd been too busy thrashing around trying to dodge the Certificate of Nomination. I couldn't quite deny that I was broke for a politician... but twenty million wasn't about to sink me.
Which means I have no reason to scramble for a return on my investment.
I had no one to bankroll and no kickbacks to collect. My salary would start landing on schedule the following month, and that alone would fund a comfortable life.
"Mayor Min Seojun, I look forward to seeing a great deal more of you!"
And with that, the prosperity committee chairman departed, the implication trailing behind him: guarantee my interests, and the money will follow.
There was a third visitor, and this one was a politician.
"Mayor-elect Min Seojun? Kwon Changsik, Maesan City Council."
A councilman of the Together Democratic Party, and the man all but installed as the council's next chairman. The Together Democrats naturally held the majority in the chamber, but he didn't strike me as the type to come lecture the mayor-elect about minding the council just because his party owned it.
"Mayor-elect Min Seojun. Now that you've won the mayor's office, don't make the mistake of thinking this is the final station of your career. You understand that, yes?"
"I'd like to hear exactly what you're getting at."
"A landslide margin plus the youngest-ever title? You've got the star quality to ride straight into Yeouido someday. And what do you suppose a man needs to get to Yeouido?"
"In the spirit of cooperative governance, I'd be honored to hear your expert opinion."
"A clean image, free of political noise. Get into a bloody, drawn-out war with the city council right out of the gate, and how do you suppose you'll ever reach the big water?"
It was a benediction of sorts, his way of offering to help me stack up achievements. It was also a roundabout proposal to skip the fighting and split the pie like reasonable men. Modern national politics was professional wrestling with the brawling forcibly edited out, but out in the regions, the old custom of reading the room and dividing the spoils regardless of party was alive and well. The capital region was no exception. Nobody was watching, and half the time nobody even cared, so why manufacture a war?
"Our mayor-elect Min Seojun. I can tell you're not the kind of talent meant to rot in a municipal post. I know how to read a man's face, and yours says it plain as day."
"Thank you for the generous read."
"Glad to see we speak the same language!"
The council chairman presumptive beamed at me with magnificent, avuncular warmth, all here's to a bright future together. Honestly, that smile fascinated me.
Are these people coordinating with each other?
The hunger for reelection. The desire to recoup campaign costs plus a little something extra. And the dream of higher office. Those three appetites were the main reasons politicians, mayors and governors above all, got domesticated without ever noticing it happening. To build a vote bank, you had to hand the machine bosses discretion; take the money, and you owed interests bigger than the sum itself; obsess over achievements, and your actual job quietly rotted.
And sooner or later, that's how you go under.
I had no intention of getting caught in that current. But issuing a warning, I have no intention of making deals with any of you, would have been its own flavor of pathetic. Declaring that I would refuse dirty money and govern with clean hands would have been even stupider.
Frankly speaking...
The most effective move was to seize on some pretext and hammer one of them before I even took office. Inspire fear and you acquire authority; acquire authority and everyone starts watching their step. After that, nobody would look at me as a mayor who could be gaslit. Call it primitive if you liked, but politics had always been a little animal.
Not more, not less. Just one of them.
To take smooth control of the city government, I needed an example to make. Of course, I would need a legitimate pretext. Strike without one, and they would simply close ranks, united against me alone. Who that example would turn out to be, I couldn't yet say.
I had received the local old guard. Now it was time to meet the civil servants who would be working beside me.
"Mr. Mayor-elect? We will now begin the departmental briefings on core operations."
The mayor-elect's transition briefings: a procedure in which the executives of Maesan City Hall filed in one after another and reported their departments' status to me.
"Hong Changgi, Director General of Planning and Finance."
"Im Uk, Chief of the Budget Division. A pleasure to make your acquaintance."
"And I'm the chief of Revenue Collection..."
Two bureaus a day. I was scheduled to meet every official at Grade 5 and above over the course of briefing week. I had expected this part, but the civil servants' bearing was noticeably stiff. The rare administrative-exam hires were already in their forties, and the officials who had climbed from Grade 7 or Grade 9 were my own contemporaries, barely a few years younger than my father. In principle rank outranked age, but the gap here was a little too wide for that logic to carry.
Awkward atmosphere aside, the briefings themselves proceeded peacefully.
"...Mr. Mayor-elect, beginning with revenue. As you know, compared with neighboring Pyeongtaek or Hwaseong, Maesan lacks a major-corporation hinterland, so our dependence on local income tax runs low. On top of that, the real estate slump has dragged on, and this year's acquisition tax revenue has come in roughly eighteen billion won short of last year's. The general grant allocation is on a downward track as well."
"I'm aware. And on the expenditure side?"
"Fixed costs are squeezing the city's finances. Rigid expenditures have been climbing by an average of more than five percent a year, so..."
The litany of we have no money rolled on. Maesan City was broke. Gyeonggi Province's own finances were a train wreck, so counting on adjustment grants was a long shot. And per the briefing, the central government wouldn't be sending money our way either. It wasn't bleak. I'd had the full picture before I ever declared my candidacy.
Somehow, I'll make it work.
The Planning and Finance Bureau briefing wrapped up without incident. Next came the Bureau of Autonomous Administration, and one of the division chiefs stood out, planted in a posture so rigid it looked rehearsed.
"Section Chief of Citizen Cooperation."
He was the division chief responsible for residents' self-governance, civic organizations, volunteer programs, that portfolio. It was an important post, the kind of seat reserved for civil servants who knew how to stay in tune with the mayor. And yet the current chief of Citizen Cooperation stood in front of me with spectacularly poor bearing: hands clasped behind his back, torso tilted slightly forward, a crease knotted between his brows as though something about me deeply displeased him...
I knew exactly why he was like that, of course.
"Section Chief Min Taegi?"
"...Yes."
Chief of Citizen Cooperation, Min Taegi. My father. Judging by his expression, reporting on the job to his own son was a profoundly uncomfortable experience.
Fortunately, I felt no obligation to spare his feelings. After all, I wasn't the one squirming.
"I'll have the status report first. Begin."
I was genuinely curious whether my father still looked at me and saw a hopeless fucking idiot.