[Editorial] President-party relations

Gone are the days when the president concurrently held the presidency of the ruling party. The cabinet in the presidential office used to be the main source of the governing party finance, including funds for election campaigns. If these are the legends of the past dictatorial rule, the relations between the president and the ruling party have gradually been loosened since democratization.

In the Lee Myung-bak presidency, the distance between the two institutions cannot be wider. One could theoretically blame it on the president’s constitutional limitation to a single term, which naturally weakens his influence on the party. Yet, particular reasons can be found in the continuously sour relations between Lee and Park Geun-hye, his party nomination rival, and the president’s unconcealed disdain for partisan politics.

The president’s isolation from the party could bring about an early lame-duck status for himself. His recent predecessors all witnessed their popularity decline rapidly in the second half of their tenure in the peculiar Korean public atmosphere of early high expectations turning quickly into disappointments. Politicians, including contenders for the next president, tend to detach themselves from the increasingly unpopular incumbent.

In the Seoul mayoral by-election, Grand National Party candidate Na Kyung-won is desperately seeking support from Park Geun-hye instead of encouragement from President Lee Myung-bak, who still has a year and five months to complete his five-year tenure. It is more from her calculation of practical gains than from her caution about the administration’s neutrality in elections.

Park has yet to give her full endorsement to Na since she became the sole candidate for the conservative camp with the exit of civic activist Lee Seog-yeon from the race. Political rumors have it that Park may be reluctant to come to the fore in support of Na because having a woman elected mayor of the capital city could affect the chances of the electorate choosing another woman as the president next year. Besides, she would not want to share responsibility in the event the GNP candidate loses in the Oct. 26 poll.

President Lee has kept his distance from the election of Seoul mayor, the office he had held before making his bid for presidency. Whatever happens in the election in Seoul, the president’s schedule in the last quarter of 2011 will be dominated by overseas trips to attend annual regional meetings, including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

A big challenge for him next year will be what role he could play in the nomination process for the April parliamentary election. It is feared that the Lee-Park disharmony may explode over the distribution of party tickets if no dramatic compromise has been made between the rival factions. The ensuing GNP general convention to pick up the ruling party’s presidential candidate will define the president’s final role in national politics, although it will be minimal.

Lee’s relations with the GNP, or his control of the party, remained thin because of the intra-party incongruity, but he is the only president since 1988 who has not attempted to strengthen his grip on the ruling party through reorganizing and renaming it. All his predecessors did so in order to integrate with opposing forces or to purge dissenters.

President Lee may regret at this point that his ties with the government party were less than ideal, particularly considering his failure to reconcile with the Park Geun-hye group. Some of his major policies ― such as the one to scrap the new Sejong administrative city plan ― had to be abandoned due to the dissident faction’s non-cooperation in the Assembly.

Some could attribute it to Lee’s limited political caliber as a man who grew up in the business world and had few loyal comrades to fight opponents together. Still, Lee, feeling that the single-term limitation deprives the president of effective leverage on the party, proposed revising the constitution last year to make a second term possible for his successors. Neither the opposition nor his own party responded positively.

A premature weakening of the presidency is least desirable. The incumbent and the ruling party need to explore a better way of collaboration as they at least share a common goal that is to remain in power.