Moon's hour has come - again

By Choi Sung-jin

President Moon Jae-in is a political leader with many blessings. Moon snatched the top job rather unexpectedly in May 2017 when his impeached predecessor, Park Geun-hye, could not finish her term in office.

Moon's governance over the past three years or so has been neither successful nor popular. South Korean leaders are judged by their attainments in two areas ― economic progress and national security.

Amid the protracted business slump, the income gap between the haves and have-nots widened. Inter-Korean relations have all but been frozen, as Pyongyang vows to sever almost all ties with Seoul for the time being. Moon's approval rating continued to slide, to the surprise of few.

In striking back the conservative opposition party's political attacks, however, Moon's governing party officials had only to say to people, “So, would you like to go back to Park Geun-hye's days?” His current opponents, including Park's former cronies, were equally incompetent and reactionary. All this shows why some political commentators here say Moon is “blessed with lousy rivals.”

Still, Korean voters had been ready to punish Moon's left-of-center party in last week's general election for focusing only on an agenda that was political and social instead of focusing on bread-and-butter issues. Then the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, burying all other election issues. Moon made some mistakes in the early stages of the new coronavirus outbreak by, for instance, moving too close toward the epicenter, China, and hastily declaring the worst was over.

Thanks to a combination of factors ― self-sacrificing medical workers, mature citizenry, and the government's circumspection ― Korea has somehow become one of the world's most exemplary coronavirus fighters. Voters, most of whom felt pride in their being Korean probably for the first time in their lives as well as the necessity of a reliable government in global adversity, gave President Moon's party a landslide victory. No left-leaning party has won 180 seats in the nation's 300-member unicameral parliament before.

Looking back, however, the nation's commendable response to the coronavirus is the result of lessons from the previous government, namely the tragic sinking of the Sewol in 2014 and the disastrous handling of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) the following year.

Safety- and health-related agencies learned precious lessons from the two catastrophic events and rectified their shortcomings. The Moon administration also had only to do the opposite of its predecessor, which at first was negligent of those incidents' magnitude and later was busy hiding facts, making excuses, and justifying their blunders.

Now, a much harder part awaits Moon and his government ― giving an excellent finishing touch to the anti-pandemic campaign, and, more importantly, protecting people from the economic fallout until things return to a semblance of normalcy. Moreover, there are no precedents, good or bad, and here or abroad, to refer to. Moon and his Cabinet must do this job entirely on their own.

More than anything else, they should prop up the crumbling economy. Most urgent in this regard is to help people who live from hand to mouth survive the pandemic amid social distancing and resultant mass layoffs. They should also waste no more time in providing emergency relief funds to small businesses and the self-employed.

It is more than regrettable in this regard that the government and ruling party have been arguing for nearly two months over whom to give 1 million won ($820) to ― all Koreans as the ruling party insists versus the bottom 70 percent in the income bracket as the government is sticking to. The government is right. Unlike basic income, this is one-off relief money.

If the top 30 percent are not spending money, it is not because they don't have it but because they can't go outside their homes freely. The government should use the saved budget for preventing businesses, large or small, from going belly up due to a temporary financial crunch resulting from plunging demand. The right timing is everything. Give them the money first, and plug the loopholes later.

The Moon administration should also prepare for longer-term changes in the “post-coronavirus world.” Pundits across the world predict the era of global free, open trade will give place to nationalism and “walled city” mindsets, as described by Henry Kissinger. This will be bad news for a small, open economy like Korea, which relies on exports for 60 percent of its economic growth. Unlike the U.S. and Japan that have key currencies, the nation cannot inject liquidity into the economy without limits for fear of hurting its fiscal health.

Even when all countries suffer from the same problem, some stand out by tiding it over better than others, however. Korea has contained the coronavirus like few countries have done so far. The nation can ― and should ― re-enact it in an “economic quarantine” by minimizing the pandemic's damage on Korea Inc., too.

The nation's biggest weapon is the people's newfound confidence. Koreans saw neither the West's freewheeling style nor China's authoritarian model work as good as their combination of the government showing leadership by example and people responding with active engagement.

When COVID-19 is over sooner or later, the world may go back to the way it was. However, it will not exactly be the same as it used to be. Depending on how Korea spends the time until then, the nation's voice and status will be more audible and visible on the international economic and diplomatic stages than ever before.

President Moon's hour has come, once again, and probably for the last time. He should persuade his political opponents more humbly and move toward North Korea and the rest of the world more boldly. If he cannot practice what he has promised in the next two years, no Korean presidents will have such an opportunity again. Koreans will be keeping their fingers crossed that Moon's luck will become that of the nation.

Choi Sung-jin (

choisj1955@naver.com

) is a Korea Times columnist.