Take care with any constitutional change

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Opinion

Michael Breen

Take care with any constitutional change

Posted : 2016-10-31 17:36

Updated : 2016-10-31 17:44

By Michael Breen

The proposal last week by President Park Geun-hye that Korea change its Constitution presents lawmakers with a long overdue chance to improve the country's governance.

But as they consider the best way to make this improvement, they need to make sure that they don't make things worse.

The central assumption behind the proposal for change is that limiting a president to a single, five-year term no longer serves the country well.

That is because politicians no longer fear, as they did in 1987 when the current Constitution was written, that a president may be tempted to manipulate the rules to keep himself ― or herself ― in power indefinitely.

The new system is most likely to be American-type, reducing the term to four years but allowing the president to run for a second term. Korea is ready, people believe, for the same person to be in power for eight years without any concern that he or she will find a way to make it twelve or sixteen.

The removal of the original motive for the five-year term allows us to consider its defects. The main argument is that it causes short-term government planning and lack of policy consistency from one administration to another.

This is a valid point. Right now, the extraordinary and, given North Korea and its nuclear weapons, somewhat shocking truth is that there is no long-term planning in Korea. No plans aim beyond the term of the sitting president. (The one exception I am aware of is the ten-year land use plan).

What this means is that, thanks to the five-year presidential term, there is no national vision. When you ask a leader what it is, the response you get has been made up by speechwriters. What is the vision for our future with North Korea? No idea. What is our vision for the future of East Asia and our role in that community? Not sure. What is our strategy for dealing with North Korean weapons? Oh, it's to criticize them until February 2018. After that, we're in unchartered territory.

How, then, would a four-year term, possibly twice for the same person, change things?

Good question. In some respects it won't.

The fact of the matter is that the lack of continuity, characterized by bureaucratic inertia as government officials start to position themselves for the next administration, will be the same whether the president is in power for four, five or eight years. It can only change with the introduction of a more mature punishment-reward system for government officials.

On the plus side, the possibility of a second term makes for more prolonged periods of competent rule. Here's how: people who study presidents say that the first year of any leader's term is a learning process and the last year is lame-duckery. That has given each Korean president since 1987 three years to introduce and manage his or her program.

The chance of eight years in power, however, does more than double this period. It expands it to six years. (The one year of learning and one year as a lame duck remain the same). So, a good president gets six good years; a bad one gets tossed out earlier than now. Win-win.

But there is another consideration. That is that the folk planning the constitutional change may want to mess with presidential powers so that Korea gets either the US presidential system on one hand or the British/Japanese-type parliamentary system on the other or something French or German in between.

All of these are forms of democracy and I am not sufficiently versed in them to say which would be best for Korea. But I have one concern.

Besides Australia and New Zealand―which, if want to be racist about it, aren't Asian and don't count ―Korea is in many respects the most democratic of all Asian democracies.

Consider that in six presidential elections it has twice elected oppositionists (Kim Dae-jung and Lee Myung-bak). What's more, we have also elected a political outsider (Roh Moo-hyun) and a woman (Park Geun-hye). Compare that with most other Asian democracies where the ruling side stays in power forever, a fact which does not make them undemocratic but is less evidence of the will of the people than of the skill of the manipulators.

Like it or not, the single term has been a key factor delivering that feisty character of Korean democracy.

It would be a pity if the changes made in good faith were to unintentionally bring the curtain down on the feisty era and pave the way for a ruling party to stay in power for 50 years.

Michael Breen is the CEO of Insight Communications Consultants, a public relations company, and author of "The Koreans" and "Kim Jong-il: North Korea's Dear Leader."