June 9 (UPI) -- South Korea held its ninth nationwide local elections Wednesday. By early afternoon, something unprecedented had occurred.

Ballot papers ran out across the country. Fifty polling stations experienced shortages. Voting was suspended at 22 of them. Citizens who had arrived to exercise their most fundamental democratic right were turned away and told to wait, sometimes for hours.

What happened next was something I could not have imagined growing up in North Korea. The people took to the streets -- spontaneously, peacefully and in enormous numbers. Those in their 20sand 40s led the demonstrations, constituting more than half of those present at the Jamsil counting center.

Their signs were handwritten, and the demand written on nearly every one of them was the same: re-election. University student councils at more than 100 institutions across the country issued statements and declarations condemning the crisis. Students plastered campuses with handwritten notices. The demand was not partisan. It was procedural: Our votes matter, and the state owes us an accounting.

And then came the label. Far right. This was not the first time South Korea's progressive camp reached for that designation when young citizens failed to behave as expected.

During the 2025 presidential campaign, then-candidate Lee Jae Myung said at a university forum: "Among the youth generation, some have become very conservative -- and in some cases, even a small minority has become far right. They are like blank paper that has been contaminated -- those who live near ink become black."

He was not alone in that assessment. Park Gu-yong, then head of the Democratic Party's education institute, argued that conservative-leaning young people should be "isolated until they wither," describing them as having "no capacity for reflection, only calculation," and declaring: "Do not hold out hope - this cannot be corrected." He subsequently resigned from the position. But the sentiment did not leave with him.

Then came Friday, two days after the election crisis. Jeong Jun-hee, an adjunct professor at Hanyang University and former host of MBC's flagship debate program, appeared on Maebulshow -- a pro-ruling-party YouTube channel with 2.9 million subscribers -- and described a portion of the 2030 generation as a "far-right group" with "no system of thought, no philosophy, no coherent set of values."

He then said "it is necessary to use the baton in a lawful way" -- that these young people could not be persuaded and must instead be "subdued through power."

When I read those words, something clicked into place -- not as a political analysis, but as a memory.

I grew up in a system where the state's relationship to young people who deviated from prescribed thinking was precisely this: not persuasion, but the baton.

Kim Jong Un has formalized this into explicit policy. Through what his regime calls human remodeling and through legislation such as the Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Law, the North Korean government has designated young people's exposure to outside culture -- South Korean dramas, foreign music, independent economic activity -- as ideological contamination requiring forcible correction.

I saw this applied to people I knew. In 2005, friends of mine at Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies were caught watching South Korean dramas. They were sent to a labor camp for six months of forced labor and ideological study sessions -- what the state called thought ideological remodeling. The goal was not punishment. It was correction. The assumption was that their minds had been contaminated and needed to be remade.

The logic is always the same: These young people have been corrupted. Their thinking is wrong. They cannot be reasoned with. They must be corrected by force.

Now listen again to what was broadcast on the Maebulshow on Wednesday: Young people who voted the wrong way are a "far-right group" with "no system of thought." They cannot be persuaded. "The baton" is necessary. "Power" must be applied.

The words are different. The grammar is identical.

I want to be precise: I am not saying South Korea's ruling camp is North Korea. But the reflex -- the impulse to classify dissenting citizens as ideologically contaminated subjects requiring correction rather than constituents with legitimate grievances -- does not belong exclusively to totalitarian systems.

It lives, in attenuated but recognizable form, in any political culture that has forgotten what democratic citizenship requires of those in power. And when that reflex is expressed not once but repeatedly, by a presidential candidate, a ruling party's educational institute director and a former national broadcaster, it is no longer a private opinion. It is a pattern.

One South Korean professor wrote with honesty after the election, "When politics fails, the first word that appears is blame directed at the voters."

One road is familiar: call them far right, treat them as a problem of cognitive warfare. That road is comfortable. It avoids internal accountability. That road is also, I would add, the road that leads away from democracy. I recognize where it goes.

The young people being described as extremists were, in reality, doing something I never could have done in the country where I was born -- standing in a public space and telling the government it had failed them.

In North Korea, that thought does not form, not because it is suppressed, but because the entire architecture of society is designed to prevent it from arising. You cannot demand accountability from a system that has told you, from birth, that the state and the people are one and that dissent is by definition contamination.

South Korea's 2030 generation has not been contaminated. They have been educated -- in the deepest sense -- in what it means to be a citizen. Calling them far right for exercising that citizenship is not a political judgment.

It is a confession of fear -- the fear of an arrogant establishment confronted by citizens who know their rights and refuse to forget them.