hankyoreh

Han Dong-hoon, the interim leader of the ruling People Power Party, doubles over in a bow to President Yoon Suk-yeol while the two meet at the site of a major fire in South Chungcheong Province on Jan. 23. (Yonhap)

By Park Chan-su, editor-at-large

The image of Han Dong-hoon performing a 90-degree bow to President Yoon Suk-yeol on Tuesday at Seocheon Market in South Chungcheong Province captured a symbolic moment.

Last Sunday, media began reporting that Yoon — a regular member of the People Power Party (PPP) — had demanded the resignation of Han, who as emergency committee chairperson is effectively the party’s leader.  

The conflict between these two figures, whose relationship as fellow prosecutors dates back 20 years, took two days to resolve. Comically, the president canceled a roundtable on livelihood issues that he had promised the public in order to put on this particular show.

All that’s left now is the reality that within the ruling party, first lady Kim Keon-hee is an untouchable topic — like Voldemort, she is not to be mentioned by name or messed with in any way.

It seems apparent that this unexpected internecine strife was touched off by PPP emergency committee member Kim Kyung-yul’s “Marie Antoinette” comments.

The same day that Han alluded to giving Kim Kyung-yul a strategic nomination to run for the Mapo B seat in Seoul, Kim Kyung-yul made comments demanding an apology from Kim Keon-hee for her acceptance of a luxury handbag.

“Why did the French Revolution happen? It erupted after revelations about Marie Antoinette’s luxuries and wild personal life,” he said. “I think this incident has also touched a nerve with the public.”

According to Hankyoreh’s reporting, Kim Keon-hee was quite shocked to hear herself being compared to Marie Antoinette. She was probably furious about being likened to a queen who was executed during the revolution after being portrayed as a symbol of extravagance and corruption. That anger would have been what prompted her husband to demand a bow from Han Dong-hoon.

So has everything been put to bed now?

A famous scandal involving a diamond necklace was a contributing factor in the story of how an immature young queen from Austria ended up on the guillotine. Napoleon would later say that her death “clearly can be attributed to the ‘necklace affair.’”

The incident in question took place four years before the French Revolution. There were a lot of players involved, but the basic story is a simple one.

A couple of Jewelers in Paris made an enormously expensive necklace with 647 individual diamonds in it, only to end up unable to find a buyer. The wife of one count told a cardinal who wanted to get into Marie Antoinette’s good graces that the queen secretly wanted to buy the necklace.

She suggested that he ought to buy it and give it to her, and he ended up purchasing it under these false pretenses. The count’s wife made off with both the necklace and the money.

Her fraud came to light later on when the cardinal and jewelers asked Marie Antoinette about the necklace. It was a garden-variety swindle that had nothing actually to do with the queen. But to the French people, she became a symbol of the corruption and avarice of France’s aristocratic society and the extravagance and vanity of the Bourbon royal family.

Obviously, there’s no real comparison between the affair of the diamond necklace and Kim Keon-hee’s luxury handbag incident. While the necklace was an enormously expensive piece of jewelry made with 647 brilliants, Kim’s Dior bag was just a small gift worth a “measly” 3 million won, or around US$2,200.

But there are similarities in terms of the incidents building a wall of distrust between the people in power and the general public.

Before the necklace affair, Marie Antoinette was already being denounced for blowing through the royal family’s finances on lavish and extravagant things. All the necklace did was to send her already-poor reputation with the public to rock-bottom levels.

Rather than loudly decrying how the first lady was “victimized” by a “hidden camera sting,” the presidential office ought to be reflecting objectively on why this incident escalated to the point where it was dividing the ruling party.

Underlying the response to the “handbag affair” are a number of factors that include the many past controversy surrounding Kim Keon-hee: the allegations of plagiarizing her doctoral dissertation and engaging in stock price manipulations, the stories about relying on shamans and involving them in personnel appointments, and the suggestion that her family was given special treatment related to a planned expressway project.

While Marie Antoinette was genuinely in the dark about the necklace affair, Kim Keon-hee accepted the bag in question without hesitation. While the presidential office has been talking about how the handbag was designated a presidential archival material and stored as a national asset, there has been no answer to the most important question: Why didn’t she simply refuse the bag at the time?

With the deferential bow he received from Han Dong-hoon, Yoon Suk-yeol appears to have quieted the calls within the party for a personal explanation from Kim Keon-hee. But everyone involved — Yoon, Han and Kim included — most likely realizes that this is not the end of things.

Three centuries ago in France, King Louis XVI had a cardinal jailed to demonstrate his wife’s innocence, but his actions just ended up further fueling the public’s anger.

The bag affair is likely to make itself felt even more intensely as the general election in April approaches. The sparks of calls for the truth have already started to fall on the parched kindling of distrust.

It’s the sort of thing that cannot be fought off with a performance of Yoon and Han firmly shaking hands in the wind at the scene of a disaster.

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