What Park can do
(0).jpg?w=728)
By Tong Kim
It has been fascinating to watch how an unprecedented political drama is unfolding regarding the presidency of South Korea. It has breathtaking elements of suspension and surprise.
What will happen to President Park, who defies angry public demands to relinquish her presidential authority? She evokes the constitutional ground which makes a president immune to criminal prosecution, except for charges of “insurrection and treason”.
She is scheduled for an interview with prosecutors this week, according to her attorney. Prosecutors are investigating her involvement in the criminal charges against her confidant Choi Soon-sil, who allegedly meddled in state affairs in an unofficial capacity and amassed wealth illegally. Choi is yet to be indicted at the time of writing, on the charges of “abuse of power and fraud”.
Last week the National Assembly passed a legislation to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Choi Soon-sil case and all other suspects involved. The legislation requires the president to appoint a special prosecutor from two candidates recommended - one each by the two major opposition parties. The independent prosecutor will take over the investigation that has been conducted by President Park’s prosecution service.
There are three possible paths to normalizing national governance — resignation, impeachment, or step back behind a bipartisan prime minister. However, all these three scenarios are problematic.
First, if Park steps down, a special presidential election should be held in 60 days and the current prime minister will run the government as acting president. In addition, an immediate resignation would not allow enough time to prepare for an orderly election.
Second, impeachment is possible under the constitution, but it could take more than six months. There is no guarantee that the national parliament will be able to muster a two-thirds vote needed to pass an impeachment bill. The opposition groups have 171 votes, 29 short of 200 to make up two-thirds. Even if it passes, it will require a final ruling by the Constitutional Court in 180 days. If ruled against Park, the country will have 60 days to elect a new president. By the time the issue is settled one way or the other, Park would have served most of her term before ending in February 2018.
Third, the notion of an empowered prime minister has no constitutional support. Under the constitution, a prime minister cannot do much, other than recommending cabinet nominees and overseeing the cabinet ministers under the direction of the president. Only when a president is dead or unable to perform her or his duty, due to an unavoidable reason, can a prime minister serve as an acting president, fully in control of domestic and foreign policy.
However, there are indications that Park has made up her mind not to step down or accept a politically expedient arrangement, as demanded by the opposition parties, for terminating her affiliation with the ruling Saenuri Party and turning over her authority to a neutral prime minister, which would be unconstitutional.
She seems determined to stay in power, as long as possible, unmindful of, or ready for the impeachment proceedings that the National Assembly may choose to undertake. President Park took two weeks to come to the decision to hang in there against odds, without input from her long-time personal advisor, Choi Soon-sil, who is locked up in jail and incommunicado.
Supporting evidence for her decision is detectable. She returned to performing her presidential duties, taking executive action on domestic and foreign policy. She appointed a vice minister, and she instructed the justice minister to conduct “a thorough investigation” of a separate case involving business and politics, a move suspected as her attempt to divert attention from the Choi Soon-sil case.
She also dispatched an official delegation headed by a vice foreign minister to Washington to consult with Trump transition members to learn about their thinking on Korea in an attempt to influence them toward a favorable consideration of the current position of South Korea.
Incidentally, a five-member parliamentary delegation, representing all three major parties, also visited New York and Washington last week to get a sense of where the Trump administration is heading on its Korea policy. The delegation was headed by Chung Dong-young, a former unification minister. The five lawmakers met with a number of heavy-weight foreign policy wonks, including John Bolton, a candidate for secretary of state; Ed Royce, chairman of the house foreign affairs committee; Cory Gardner, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on East Asia, Richard Haass, president of Council on Foreign Relations; Bill Burns, former deputy secretary of state and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Ed Feulner, former president of the Heritage Foundation and an advisor to the Trump transition team.
Coming back to Park’s plight, it is interesting to note that the public demand for her removal was emotion-based and the opposition and the media capitalized on it. The first president of Korea stepped down after a massive student uprising in 1960. In 2016, one million protesters demand Park to step down, but it seems that the impact of massive demonstrations has diminished over time yielding to the power of legalism.
President Park’s involvement in the scandal and her refusal to resign disclose the flaws of democracy, in the sense that state power should come from the people. The rule of law also ironically complicates the problem. Since there is no public mood to forgive Park, the challenge is how to end her presidency peacefully and legally to move on. There will be no political solution without her consent. What’s your take?
Tong Kim is a Washington correspondent and columnist for The Korea Times. He is also a fellow at the Institute of Korean-American Studies. He can be contacted at tong.kim8@yahoo.com.