hankyoreh

By Seok Jin-hwan, Blue House correspondent

Upon her return from a tour of Central Asia, President Park Geun-hye said she would look into the behavior of Moon Chang-keuk, at the time a nominee for Prime Minister. But as of June 23, three days after her return, she had still failed to make up her mind.

On the same day, Moon said once again he would do his work as he waited for the president’s decision, pressuring the Blue House to approve his nomination. For her part, Park was silent and did not respond. She even canceled the cabinet meeting she was supposed to chair on June 24.

On the morning of June 24, Moon held a press conference at the Central Government Complex in Seoul where he announced his withdrawal as nominee for prime minister. Park’s nomination of Moon, a former editor in chief of the conservative Joongang Ilbo newspaper, had created controversy due to comments he’d made during several special lectures, including about how the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea and the subsequent division of North and South was “God’s will”.

Park and the Blue House have often kept mum in the face of embarrassing problems, but this silence entails a rather more severe problem than in the past. This silence is not intended to ram through Park’s agenda without paying heed to public opinion, as she did following accusations that the National Intelligence Service (NIS) interfered in the 2012 presidential election. Rather, this silence explicitly reveals the incompetence of the current administration.

The Blue House has continued its silence on the issue even after Moon’s announcement.

There is a pile of urgent issues to attend to following the Sewol tragedy -including Japan’s provocations about historical issues and a shooting spree by a soldier on the front lines - but Park seems flustered, unable to solve her appointment problem, which has been creating a serious vacancy in the administration for the past months.

After making a nomination for Prime Minister, she has basically spent two weeks without taking any political responsibility, allowing the situation to drag on without any real progress or decisions. Meanwhile, the government is stuck in some absurd kind of limbo, as Park hesitates to even ask the National Assembly to hold confirmation hearings for the ministers nominated for her new cabinet. This calls into question what Park said during her New Year’s press conference in January about being “too busy to waste even a single second” in the second year of her presidency.

On June 23, as Park handed the certificates of nomination to the new national security chief and senior secretaries at the Blue House, she said, “We have confirmation hearings and the bill of revision for the Government Organization Act. The only way to restore stability to the government is by cooperating with the National Assembly to quickly deal with these.” But for her own part, Park had nothing to say about Moon, which is what has kept the government unstable.

Sources close to the Blue House suggest that the reason that Park has been hesitating for so long is her concern that she might lose her key support base. The argument goes that Park is feeling heat from the organized resistance of conservatives and the right wing. On Sunday, 482 prominent conservative figures issued a statement demanding that Moon’s confirmation hearing be held. Park failed to make a prompt decision, which was a sign that the controversy about Moon was shifting from a dispute about his character to an ideological debate.

Citing an announcement by the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs about the likelihood that Moon’s grandfather was a Korean independence fighter, some observers are suggesting that Park is moving to confront the issue head on.

But political observers are expressing their concern that, if Park fails to accurately assess public sentiment and keeps dragging her feet, she may suffer even more serious damage.

“Claims that Moon is pro-Japanese are not the reason for the strong public opposition to him. The problem is that his extreme ideological bias renders him unfit to be prime minister. Her assumption that his pro-Japanese remarks are the issue at hand shows that she is misreading public opinion,” a ruling Saenuri Party (NFP) official said.

Amid all this, public opinion poll group Realmeter published data showing that Park’s approval rating last week had dropped 4.7 points from the previous week to 44%, falling below the 49.3% respondents who say that Park is doing a poor job. This was the first time that negative responses exceeded positive ones not on a weekly instead of daily basis, Realmeter explained. A weekly Gallup poll released on June 20 was also the first such poll in which more respondents felt negatively about Park than positively.

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