hankyoreh

a move which could alienate his more centrist supporters.

President Lee Myung-bak has chosen to take a hard line to deal with the national political situation following the candlelight protests. First he cracked down hard on the candlelight protests, and then unreasonably gained control of government bodies, including the prosecution, and the media. He took out the tax reduction card, in which benefits flow to the haves. He is demanding investment for giving out presidential pardons to businessmen. It is regressive and rightist.

In the last presidential election, Lee gained new voting blocks in the Seoul area, voters in their 30s and 40s, and the highly educated. This is his base of support. He could not become president with just the Grand National Party’s traditional base of support -- voters in the Gyeongsang provinces, older voters over 50 and the lowly educated.

Lee had two choices to escape the crisis after he had fallen into the swamp of general mistrust in the wake of appointment scandals and the U.S. beef import negotiations. The first was to recover the support of middle-of-the-road voters, which is his new base, even if this took time. The second was to quickly escape the crisis by going to the GNP’s traditional base of support. He chose the latter.

Of course, Lee has never said he would go to the right. Yet it would not be unreasonable to call the recent string of hard-line moves, including the sacking of the KBS president, a strategy to first catch the tame rabbit, and then go catch the wild one. Cheong Wa Dae is optimistic, pointing to the president’s current approval rating of over 30 percent and believing it could top 40 percent after the Chuseok holiday in September.

Within this optimism, however, there are criticisms and voices of warning. One Cheong Wa Dae official said that definitively speaking, his recent turn to the right runs counter to his base of support. He said that concentrating on the GNP’s conservative base alone could garner no more than 30 percent support, and that Lee needs to take measures to restore the trust of centrist voters, even if this should prove a little difficult. He also expressed concern that the president was being pushed rightward since conservative figures had his ear. Many experts are concerned, too. Han Gwi-yeong of the Korea Society Opinion Institute said that rather than going all out to restore trust in his administration, Lee seems to have taken the politically expedient route of gaining control of the political situation by restoring the party’s traditional support base. He said if tensions were to worsen dramatically, the burdens the government must bear would also skyrocket.

Meanwhile, concerning the president’s rightward turn, a number of euphemisms have come into being, such as “drinking seawater to slack his thirst.” This means that division and confrontation are only growing worse. With this, the entirety of Korean society is taking a step back due to regular tensions and internalized crises.

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