While President Park Geun-hye was on a Central Asia tour last week, her approval rating took a harsh beating. It turned negative for the first time since she took office in February last year.
A Gallup Korea poll showed only 43 percent of respondents approved of the job that Park was doing, down 4 percentage points from the previous week. The share that disapproved of her gained 5 percentage points, reaching 48 percent.
As the main cause of the drop in public support for Park, the pollster cited the controversy over her nominee for prime minister, Moon Chang-keuk, and other nominees for ministerial posts.
Park’s ratings have been on the decline since the Sewol ferry capsized on April 16, leaving more than 300 people dead or missing. The latest personnel appointment debacle accelerated the downward trend.
Park needs to take her waning support seriously. It means her supporters are beginning to lose patience with her clumsy handling of state affairs. They are withdrawing their backing as Park continues to fall short of their expectations.
Falling public support will ultimately erode Park’s gravitational pull on lawmakers of the ruling Saenuri Party. For her, losing influence on Saenuri legislators is a more serious development, as it means she is slipping into lame-duck status.
In fact, signs emerged during Park’s absence last week that some Saenuri lawmakers were ready to revolt against her. As the controversy of the prime minister nominee continued, dragging down the job approval ratings of the ruling party, some Saenuri lawmakers openly called on him to withdraw from the nomination process.
Park has no one but herself to blame for all this. She had a chance to regain public confidence when she decided to have a Cabinet reshuffle in the wake of the ferry disaster.
Many expected her to present a fresh lineup of high-caliber people capable of meeting the challenge ahead: rebuilding the nation from the ground up. But disappointment was a mild way of expressing how many felt about the new lineup.
Moon was not the only nominee to have his qualifications questioned. For instance, Kim Myung-soo, the nominee for education minister, faces allegations of plagiarism.
Kim, a professor at Korea National University of Education, is alleged to have summarized a thesis of his student and published the condensed version in an academic journal introducing himself as the main author and the student as the second writer.
Kim reportedly used this unethical method for seven of the 10 papers he has published in his school journal since 2001. For each paper, he received 5 million won in research subsidies from the university.
Allegations of plagiarism were also raised against Song Gwang-yong, the president’s new senior secretary for education and culture, and Chong Jong-sup, a Seoul National University law professor who was named to head the Ministry of Security and Public Administration.
These allegations are baffling, as they could, and should, have been scrutinized before the appointments were made. They suggest, as did previous appointment failures, that the vetting process carried out by presidential aides was far from thorough, if not altogether perfunctory.
But Park’s repeated appointment fiascoes indicate that the real source of the problem lies elsewhere. Park has shown a pattern in making appointments. She is known to use a top-down approach rather than a bottom-up process.
She reportedly handpicks candidates for important posts from her own talent pool instead of choosing them from among a group of qualified figures shortlisted by her aides based on background checks.
As Park has been burned several times by ill-conceived appointments, many expected her to change her style this time. She was expected to throw away her closed approach and cast a wide net.
But she refused to change. Except for the prime minister’s office, she filled the Cabinet posts with figures from her shallow talent pool. The new lineup gave the impression that her priority was bolstering her control of the Cabinet rather than pushing for the reforms she promised.
Park pledged sweeping reforms in a nationally televised address more than a month ago. But little progress has been made, due largely to a leadership vacuum in the executive branch.
The administration cannot push forward with reforms under a prime minister who is about to quit. It was about two months ago that the incumbent prime minister offered to step down. But no one knows for sure when he will be able to hand over the baton to his successor.
Park needs to do deep soul-searching about her unending appointment debacles. To rebuild the nation, she should first connect with the public and find out what they want from her. And she needs to make appointments in a way that can win support from them.
Park may feel that her nominees for public posts are held to inordinately high standards. Indeed, opposition lawmakers as well as media outlets are more eager to pick holes in them than gauge their professional ethics and competences.
But it is the Saenuri Party that has raised the bar for public officials. The main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy is doing to her government exactly what the ruling party did to the governments of presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun when it was in opposition.
This means Park has to live with the current level of scrutiny. One way to win cooperation from the NPAD may be engaging it in handling state affairs. This may sound unrealistic in light of the partisan hostility pervading the political landscape.
Yet some of the reform-minded governors-elect of the Saenuri Party are actively seeking cooperation from the NPAD in running their provincial governments. For instance, Nam Kyung-pil, governor-elect of Gyeonggi Province, has offered to give a vice governor post to the NPAD to promote social integration. He has also launched a mechanism for regular policy consultation with the opposition party.
It is still too early to tell whether these experiments will work or not. Yet their attempts to seek high-level political collaboration with the NPAD are highly commendable. Park may want to consider emulating these efforts.
While the government is scrambling to cope with the problems exposed by the ferry tragedy, many important security and diplomatic issues that require Park’s attention have taken place. To maximize national interests, she should be able to find time to focus on them. This is all the more reason she needs to put her house in order.
By Yu Kun-ha
Yu Kun-ha is chief editorial writer of The Korea Herald. He can be reached at
khyu@heraldcorp.com. ― Ed.
