As Speaker Chung Sye-kyun noted in his speech opening the 20th National Assembly, the new parliament faces daunting challenges in the coming four years.
First and foremost is restoration of public confidence in the parliament, which dropped to its lowest level during the 19th Assembly. The new parliament should neither repeat the fierce partisan strife that often paralyzed legislative business nor tolerate corruption and abuse of power by its members.
Chung added one more important task to those and other challenges — amendment of the Constitution. Similar calls for revising the basic law have been raised intermittently during the past years, but Chung was right to describe the issue as a key national agenda item as the parliament begins its four-year term.
Chung said that constitutional revision is not an issue that the nation can keep ignoring and that someone must accomplish the task. He said that he was willing to try to lay the cornerstone. We agree that as the leader of the legislature, he is the right person to take the lead.
As Chung pointed out in his inaugural speech, the current Constitution enters its 30th year next year. No law, much less the Constitution, should be dismissed as outdated or old-fashioned only because it was written long years ago.
But there is no doubt that this country has outgrown the current Constitution, rewritten in 1987 in the wake of the fierce pro-democracy movement.
Many of its key elements — including the power structure — reflected the will of the people to end the vicious circle of dictatorship and extended rule. The installment of a single, five-year term of office for the president was based on such a consensus.
But Korean democracy has grown to the degree that it no longer needs such a Constitutional safeguard.
Moreover, many defects have been exposed in the current presidential system, some of which we witnessed through the six presidents elected since 1987, including the one who now occupies the Blue House.
Once elected, presidents tend to become self-righteous and unilateral, mainly because they don’t have to think about their reelection. Because they only have only five years, they tend to rush to accomplish too many things in a short period of time, which in many cases results in a bad legacy. All the presidents also become lame ducks with one to two years remaining in their tenures.
Things like these provide the base for advocates for rewriting the Constitution, but pushing for it had made little progress each time because of different positions of major political parties and politicians.
The fact that next presidential election is only 18 months away may also complicate the situation, as major candidates may well put their personal political interests ahead of the constitutional issue. For instance, Ahn Cheol-soo of the People’s Party has already suggested the introduction of a run-off vote for the presidential election. Opinion polls show that allowing the president two four-year terms is favored by the largest number of Koreans, but there are persistent calls for a semi-presidential system or a parliamentary system as well.
Amending the Constitution is hardly an easy task, which is why it should be entrusted to the National Assembly. It could form an ad-hoc panel to start discussions on how and when it will complete the work. It would be better for the panel to include politically neutral outside experts and civic leaders.
Chung said that the authority to amend the basic law rests with the people, and that its goal should be to achieve national integration and make the country a greater one. It is right for the speaker to say that we can no longer afford to delay such endeavors and that the parliament should lead them.
