President Lee seems to have more regrets than satisfaction as he enters the final year in his five-year tenure. In a rare press conference on Wednesday, the president was particularly apologetic about graft cases involving people around him. He said his heart stopped when another name popped up from among his aides and relatives in a corruption scandal.
Newspapers featured improprieties related to Lee’s associates on the fourth anniversary of his inauguration. “I have no words to say to the people,” the president told the press. He mentioned his responsibility for the recent controversy over the purchase of a property in the Seoul suburbs in his son’s name to build his retirement house.
The press meeting was not much of an economic review. But the president should have deep regrets over the discouraging state of the nation, with gruesome figures on youth unemployment, household debts, consumer inflation and small business bankruptcies. “There was no ‘economic president,’” a newspaper declared this week. It was a title Lee had chosen himself when he took office on Feb. 25, 2008.
He tried to console the people and himself about the lost economic dreams by noting that no one had anticipated that a global economic crisis would erupt so quickly in the first year of his presidency. Yet, he must also hate to recall the candlelight protests against his decision on U.S. beef imports in the summer of 2008.
The leftist onslaught winded the new conservative government, which also faced internal dissents from the large faction loyal to his nomination rival Park Geun-hye in the ruling party. While the president pushed “business-friendly” measures for an early recovery from the financial crisis, much of administrative energy was wasted in disputes over the four-river development project and the Sejong administrative city plan.
Relations with North Korea have remained frozen since the shooting of a South Korean tourist at the Geumgangsan resort in 2008. Pyongyang, ever audacious with its nuclear threats, sank the ties to the bottom with the deadly attacks in the West Sea in 2010. Verbal condemnations and pledges of retaliation alone could not help the Lee administration recover the trust of an indignant public.
A bad economy, internal feuds in the ruling bloc, tensions with the North, corruption around those in power and inadequate high-level appointments have robbed the ex-CEO president of his charisma and authority during the past four years. And the combined effect of all these negative factors is giving the leftist challengers premature confidence of victory in the April National Assembly elections and the presidential vote in December.
Regardless of the political consequences for himself, the last thing a president would want to do is leave office in a “horizontal” transfer of power to a rival party instead of a “vertical” one to his own. President Lee now seems determined to prevent the Democratic United Party winning the elections. Success in this task would make up for whatever failures he experienced in the Blue House, for which he may still be reluctant to take responsibility.
In the press conference, Lee went somewhat out of bounds to make verbatim quotes of DUP chair Han Myung-sook and other opposition leaders on their support for the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement and the Jeju naval base project during the last administration. The year Lee has left in the presidency is quite long enough to make a mark, and Lee should not squander it by involving himself in the quagmire of election politics.
He can best help the governing party by spending the remaining time wisely and sincerely in pursuit of important economic goals, such as fighting inflation.
