Suffering from 'buyer's remorse'

By Cho Hee-kyoung

Just a month has passed since the narrowest presidential election in Korean history, while a month is left until the inauguration. But it looks like voters are already experiencing buyer's remorse about President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol. The incoming president is being hoisted by his own petards and his closest aides seem to be making matters worse not better. Unless he learns to listen to the people and respect others more, Yoon's presidency faces a bumpy road.

Traditionally, the time between the election and taking of the office is when the president-elect should be basking in the rosy glow of a successful election campaign and enjoying a high popularity rating. Even where the election has been bitterly fought, once a winner is declared most people usually throw their support behind the incoming president because it is in their interest that the new government should succeed. After all, the new administration is starting with a clean slate and has yet to make any mistakes that it could be blamed for.

However, despite all the advantages of being the new kid on the block, recent polls show that Yoon's approval rating has slid further down from what was already a historically low starting point of 53 percent. Some polls even show him trailing the incumbent, President Moon Jae-in, in approval rating. It did not help that the first declaration Yoon made as the winner was how he will never set even one foot in the Blue House and instead, move the presidential office to Yongsan after evicting the Ministry of Defense from its current headquarters.

The inappropriately hasty and flippant manner with which the selection of Yongsan as the new presidential office has been made; the unnecessary urgency in pursuing this course of action when it is perhaps the least important of all the campaign pledges; and the uncertain costs associated with the relocation that is only likely to balloon have left most people scratching their heads about the move; or if not the move itself, then at least the timing of the move. Many suspect that it is in fact being driven by superstition, some kind of geomancy and shamanic involvement: after all, Yoon has shown form in that regard several times.

Rather than browbeating Moon into signing off on the interim funding for the office relocation, if Yoon had instead declared that having listened to the people, he has decided to shelve the move for the time being and spend the money instead on helping and housing those poor people who have lost all their earthly possessions in the recent devastating fires, he could have easily shored up the popular support that he sorely needs.

Instead, he and his transition team seem bent on frittering away what little political capital they possess and creating needless conflict by demanding clemency for former President Lee Myung-bak and challenging the appointment of the seemingly perfectly well-qualified governor of the Bank of Korea, among other things.

They say your choice of friends shows what kind of person you are. We do not know Yoon's choice of friends but his choice of the transition team certainly seems to show his mindset and his biases. Made up mostly of graduates from Seoul National University in their fifties in possession of a Y chromosome, they gave birth to a neologism, Seo-O-Nam: Seoul National University graduate; in his 50s (O-sip in Korean); and male (Namja in Korean). Their elitism, conservatism and male chauvinism are on full display for everyone to see. A lack of imagination seems to be a bonus.

The nomination of Han Duk-soo as the prime minister is a case in point. Han is a septuagenarian technocrat who served as the last prime minister of the Roh Moo-hyun government and as the Korean ambassador to the U.S. under the Lee Myung-bak administration. A man who is like water in that he is colorless, almost odorless (although we will have to wait and see how he fares in the confirmation hearing this time around) and he seems just to go with the flow.

If Yoon means what he says and will entrust to the prime minister much of the running of the government, should the people not expect a better indication of his governing philosophy? Yoon's platform seems to be a hodgepodge of the free market, "the market knows best," "trust everything to the invisible hand" kind of Washington consensus-style ideas on the one hand and a whole laundry list of populist, Chavez-esque handouts and giveaways on the other.

Some compare Yoon to Donald Trump and much like Trump vis-a-vis Obama, instead of having his own coherent agenda, Yoon's agenda seems to be simply everything anti-Moon. In short, undo everything that the Moon administration has done and just do the exact opposite of whatever they did.

At the heart of his anti-Moon platform is Yoon's determination to restore the Public Prosecution Office (PPO) to its former glory. He proposes to get rid of the sole avenue of supervision that exists over the PPO by the justice minister and give the PPO an independent budget. Under Yoon, the PPO would become a leviathan answerable to no one except the president himself. One cannot help but recall Lord Acton's famous remark, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men …"

There is a reason why the PPO is the least trusted legal institution in Korea. If Yoon has begun as he means to go on, it is going to be a very long five years.

Cho Hee-kyoung (hongikmail@gmail.com) is a professor at Hongik University College of Law.