President's longtime friend appointed as presidential committee chief

By Ko Dong-hwan

Kim Han-gil / Courtesy of Yoon Suk-yeol's presidential office

Kim Han-gil, who supported Yoon Suk-yeol during his presidential campaign, has been appointed as the head of a presidential committee encouraging the consolidation of the public that remains deeply divided between supporters of the two main parties.

Kim's appointment came after Yoon officially launched the citizenry unification committee, which only existed as a temporary division under the presidential transition committee following Yoon's election victory in March this year.

The first Cabinet meeting with Yoon at the Government Complex in Sejong on May 26 passed legal foundations for launching and operating the committee directly under the president. Yoon, at the Cabinet meeting, urged all ministerial heads and presidential secretaries to cooperate with the newly launched committee by “looking at the country's entirety rather than being confined to a single bureau.”

With the new committee, Kim, 69, is expected to lead the country's national policies and businesses designed to break down the walls between members of the public who largely support either the ruling People Power Party (PPP) or the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK).

The former novelist and journalist became a politician in 1995 after being endorsed by former president Kim Dae-jung and winning a National Assembly seat in a general election that year.

Throughout his career as a lawmaker until 2014, he crisscrossed between the ruling and main opposition parties. He also served former president Kim Dae-jung in 1999 and became the minister of culture and tourism in 2000.

Becoming a chairman of Democratic Party in 2013, Kim co-founded New Politics Alliance for Democracy ― the predecessor of DPK ― the following year with Ahn Cheol-soo, who contested Yoon during the latest presidential election and now a PPP lawmaker, and served as a co-chairman with Ahn.

Kim's relationship with Yoon started blossoming in 2013 when Kim met then-prosecutor Yoon at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office while Yoon was going through a hurdle in an aftermath of a prosecutorial investigation into the National Intelligence Service's illegal intervention in the 2013 presidential election campaign.

Kim came back to public spotlight in November last year after Yoon hired Kim in his presidential election camp as the head of a committee oriented to draw preliminary sketches for Yoon's new administration. Since then, it is known than Kim has been helping Yoon, the political neophyte who stepped down from the country's prosecutor-general position last year to run in the presidential election.