South Korea’s President Sags in Opinion Polls

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November 27, 2006
South Korea’s President Sags in Opinion Polls
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
SEOUL, South Korea — Bruised by South Korea’s cutthroat politics, bewildered by voters’ rapidly changing concerns and battered mercilessly in the polls, President Roh Moo-hyun is limping toward the last year of his term.

But it is not Mr. Roh’s engagement of North Korea, or even its recent nuclear test, that has saddled him with a current approval rating of 11 percent. It is the economy.

“The main reason we have lost support is that we were not able to perform well on issues of livelihood,” said Chun Jung-bae, a senior lawmaker in the governing Uri Party and a close ally of Mr. Roh. “The overall economy is not bad — the growth rate is over 4 percent — but the life of the average person is very difficult.”

Indeed, even as the North Korean crisis widens the gap between Seoul and Washington, it is nothing like a hot-button issue here among voters. North Korea’s nuclear test last month has, if anything, reconfirmed the national consensus that South Korea has no choice but to keep its policy of engaging North Korea.

But with Mr. Roh weak and limited to a single five-year term by the Constitution, attention has begun shifting to the next presidential election, in December 2007, and the opposition is focusing on a potentially more resonant issue than North Korea.

“The biggest issue in the next election will be the economy, and then the North Korean nuclear issue or other inter-Korean issues,” said Lee Myung-bak, the former mayor of Seoul and the leading presidential candidate of the main opposition Grand National Party.

Mr. Lee, like other members of his conservative party, has accused Mr. Roh of coddling the North. But putting the spotlight on North Korea in the next election would expose the fact that, beneath the harsh talk, the opposition’s approach to North Korea is not radically different.

“I and my party, the G.N.P, feel the engagement policy should be adjusted,” Mr. Lee said in an interview. “But we’re not saying we should not carry it out or should reject it.”

Unlike Mr. Roh, Mr. Lee said he would join an American-led effort to inspect North Korean vessels in South Korean waters, but only, he added, if the United States understood that South Koreans wanted to avoid “military confrontation” at all cost. He said he would continue South Korea’s two main economic projects with the North, a resort and an industrial park.

It is an indication of how much the political ground has shifted here in the last four years that the debate over North Korea is taking a back seat in the next election. In 2002, Mr. Roh, a relatively little-known human rights lawyer and former legislator who made his name defending students and labor organizers against the military government of the 1980s, swept to victory with promises of engagement with the North, independence from Washington and democratization in his own country.

As an outsider, Mr. Roh made headway in breaking the collusive relationship between politics and the country’s traditional power holders by diminishing the role of the conservative news media and letting prosecutors pursue wrongdoing by the conglomerates. He gave autonomy to the country’s prosecutors, tax collectors and intelligence officials.

“In the past, every president wielded power through these three offices,” said Kang Won-taek, a political scientist at Soongsil University here. Yet, he added, President Roh is to some extent a victim of his own success. “Koreans are now satisfied with the way Korean democracy is working,” he said. “People are free.”

Political analysts say Mr. Roh was too slow in recognizing that voters now want to enjoy the fruits of democratization.

“He was elected on ideological issues,” said Jeong Han-wool, a polling expert and executive director of the independently financed East Asia Institute. “But voters became exhausted on ideological issues and more interested in economic issues. North Korea did not have much impact on his approval ratings.”

With South Korea experiencing solid growth and record stock prices, Mr. Roh initially dismissed descriptions of a slumping economy as opposition chatter, experts said. He failed to see that growth was not trickling down to the average voter, who became increasingly frustrated with rising household debts, high education costs and unaffordable real estate prices.

Because of Mr. Roh’s perceived inattentiveness to the economy, his approval rating first dipped below 30 percent two years ago as he lost most of his moderate supporters, Mr. Jeong said. It fell further, into the teens this year, as his young backers also grew increasingly displeased about the economy and the high youth jobless rate, he said.

Mr. Roh looked increasingly out of touch as he kept his focus on ideological issues, including an attempt to look squarely at Korea’s wartime and postwar eras. He set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was authorized to investigate long-covered-up, unpleasant facets of the country’s history, like collaboration by some people with the Japanese during colonial rule and violations of human rights by South Korea’s military dictatorships.

“Looking into the past is something that every society must do,” said the Rev. Song Ki-in, president of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “No voters can deny this. But they do complain there are more immediate issues that need to be taken care of, more bread-and-butter issues.”

Father Song, a Roman Catholic priest who first came to know Mr. Roh during their pro-democracy struggle, said Mr. Roh did not “compromise with those who are not righteous.”

“If his personality was not like this,” Father Song said, “he wouldn’t be in this trouble right now.”

With only two terms as a lawmaker before becoming president, Mr. Roh often seemed to lack the political skills to build ties in Parliament, even with members of his own party. After the North’s nuclear test, leaders of his party floated the idea of forming a new party as a way to loosen their ties with the unpopular president, the news media reported.

“There may have been one or two people who wanted to distance themselves from President Roh Moo-hyun, but it was not a big movement,” said Mr. Chun, his close ally.

Around that time, Mr. Roh visited his predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, at his private residence and is said to have asked for his backing.

In an interview, Mr. Kim — who received a Nobel Peace Prize for originating the so-called sunshine policy toward the North and still enjoys strong support, especially in his native southwest region — said the two avoided talking about domestic politics. “I did not want to intervene or participate in the issues of domestic politics,” Mr. Kim said.

Whatever was discussed between them, Mr. Kim’s public show of support was enough to quiet the unrest in Mr. Roh’s party and to deflect pressure from the opposition and the United States to punish North Korea.

“On the issue of the Korean Peninsula,” Mr. Kim said, “we both agreed that the sunshine policy, the principles of the engagement policy, should be kept and maintained.”