hankyoreh

By Ahn Chang-hyun, staff reporter

Park Geun-hye's approval rating has tumbled to 44%, according to a recent survey.

The slide is being attributed to negative public opinion about the President-elect's recent selections for the Cabinet and Blue House staff. With the rating falling below 50%, the administration is in for a rough start when it takes office next week.

The results were released on Feb. 22 from a Gallup Korea survey for the third week of February, conducted between Feb. 18 and 21.

Only 44% of respondents said Park was doing a "good job" when asked about her performance as President-elect, a five percentage point drop from the 49% recorded in a poll the week before.

Meanwhile, the number saying she was "doing poorly" also rose from 29% in the second week of February to 32% this past week.

Gallup Korea has been conducting weekly polls on Park's performance as President-elect since the third week of Japan. In that survey, conducted on Jan. 14 to 18, Park was rating as doing a good job by 55% of respondents.

But by the first week of February, her numbers were down below 50%. The new low of 44% means that Park's approval rating has dropped 12 percentage points from its high of 56% during the fourth week in January. The latest approval rating is also 7.6 percentage points below the 51.6% of the vote with which she won the presidential election.

Performance ratings have tended to be favorable during the first quarter after a new president takes office. Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung both had ratings of 71%, Roh Moo-hyun polled at 60%, and Lee Myung-bak earned 52% approval. At the current rate, Park Geun-hye stands to take office with the lowest approval ratings in history, at less than half the population.

One of the biggest reasons for the poor ratings appears to be dissatisfaction with Park's nominations for Cabinet and key Blue House positions. Fifty-two percent of the respondents who rated her poorly gave "mistaken nominations and the hiring of unscrutinized figures" as their reason for doing so. Another 12% pointed to lack of communication with the public as a reason, while 10% gave failure to honor election-time pledges.

In particular, Park was rated as "doing well" by just 46% of people in their 50s, who were her biggest supporters in the election. Thirty-three percent of people in the same age group said she was doing poorly.

The poll was conducted through random digit dialing of mobile phone numbers. It had a 17% rate of response with a confidence level of 95% and a 2.8 percentage point margin of error.

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