Challenges for Park
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By Tong Kim
The coming inauguration of a new administration raises expectations of a better life in Korea. Even those who opposed Park Geun-hye ― 48 percent of the voters ― should hope she succeeds. If she fails, the country as a whole will not become a better place to live. Remember no government can satisfy everybody.
There are many difficult domestic and foreign policy challenges facing the first woman president of Korea. One of her first challenges is how to implement over 200 campaign promises she made that would cost about 130 trillion won without raising taxes or increased growth.
During the last election, both presidential candidates ran on similar welfare programs, espousing the role of “big government” in intervening to help the people, as they were more motivated for wooing voters. Park did not discuss how she would pay for the programs. She seemed unmindful of the fiscal limits of the government.
The President-elect reaffirmed last week that she would keep all her election promises. Due to limited revenue, many pundits and the press have suggested her transition team will have to re-review and prioritize costly campaign pledges. Even the transition team reportedly has considered whether to put off some of the less urgent programs.
Park may be well prepared to run the country, as she claims she is, with a proven record of leadership, dedication and tenacity that saved the ruling Saenuri Party twice from crisis and helped herself achieve an election victory. Still, her suspicious lack of communication and openness remain as a source of public concern. She is good at talking to people in a campaign style but it is questionable whether her advisors feel free to disagree with her and suggest ideas different to hers. As a “person of principle,” she wants to keep her word.
On the other hand, she does not use sophisticated language and sometimes people have to interpret omitted or unspoken parts of her sentences to fully understand the intended message. She is not an eloquent speaker. She does not seem to be as intelligent or creative as her predecessors like her father Park Chung-hee, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun ― the smartest among the former presidents.
However, in this age of information and renovation, high intelligence and good public speaking ability may no longer be among the basic requirements for a successful presidency, as long as a person in office has the ability to appoint capable ministers and chooses good policy advisers. In other words, Park can rely on her people for policy details. Apparently, Park trusts that her campaign promises are being prepared for implementation.
The members of her transition team have been low key while criticized as secretive. As of Saturday, Park was concentrating on the selection of her prime minister and restructuring of the presidential staff at the Blue House. A new prime minister is expected to have more power to recommend the appointment of Cabinet members.
Of the three foreign policy members of the transition team, North Korean specialist Choi Dae-seok resigned without explanation. He was considered as a moderate in favor of dialogue with the North. There were some reports that he had “behaved inappropriately” in a private sector visit to North Korea, an unsubstantiated allegation.
As for Park’s North Korea policy, Yoon Byung-sae, Park’s foreign policy brain trust, who worked as a national security advisor for Roh Moo-hyun, holds similar views to the departed Choi. Yoon also believes the new administration’s policy should differ from the hard-line one of the Lee Myung-bak administration that maintained “principles” of no economic cooperation without progress in denuclearization, which produced no results.
Yoon is known to have been a foreign policy tutor to Park since 2010. The President-elect dismissed some objections of accepting Yoon due to his former affiliation with the Roh government. She was quoted as saying, “Ideology does not matter.” Yoon is credited for helping the publication of Park’s article in The Foreign Affairs in August 2011, which stressed a “trust process” in inter-Korean relations..
Yoon has served in the foreign ministry for over three decades. He is known to believe it is possible to establish a joint fishing zone if the Northern Limit Line is observed by the North; South Korea should maintain trust with the U.S. and improve relations with China at the same time; the May 24 restrictions should be gradually eased from the low end without setting a deadline; there should be no concession on historical issues with Japan, the ROK-U.S. atomic energy agreement should be updated; and the transfer of operational control should be completed on schedule by the end of 2015.
In a meeting with her envoy’s delegation to China, Park reiterated that her government would oppose the North’s nuclear program but would seek dialogue with North Korea, while providing humanitarian assistance to the North regardless of denuclearization. North Korea is waiting for more details of Park’s policy before responding. What’s your take?
The writer is a research professor at the Illmin Institute of International Relations at Korea University and a visiting professor at the University of North Korean Studies. He is also an ICAS fellow. Reach him at tong.kim8@yahoo.com.