Darcie Draudt

May 10, 2019 marks the second anniversary of Moon Jae-in taking up the South Korean presidency. Moon came to office on a wave of popular support after his predecessor Park Geun-hye was impeached over an influence-peddling scandal. Public anger swept Moon to the Blue House and his Democratic Party to a majority position in the National Assembly.

Two years on, Moon is probably best known for his outreach to North Korea, but those efforts have stalled in the wake of a disappointing end to the U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi, Vietnam. At home, meanwhile, Moon is struggling to implement promised economic and political reforms, even while dealing with the scandals and dropping approval rates all-too-common to South Korean presidents. 

To evaluate where Moon’s administration stands nearly halfway through his single term, The Diplomat spoke to Darcie Draudt, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University who is currently based in Seoul as a visiting scholar at the Yonsei University Department of Political Science, about the state of South Korean politics, inter-Korean relations, and political and economic reforms.

Moon Jae-in’s approval rating has dropped from a high of 84 percent when he first assumed the presidency to a low of under 45 percent as of April 2019. How should we interpret these falling ratings in terms of the political consequences for Moon’s Democratic Party?

Historically, according to Gallup Korea, most of the democratically elected presidents saw an approximately 20 percentage point decline during their five-year tenures. Left-leaning president Kim Young-sam (1993-1998) saw a notable decline from the 70th percentile down to under an astonishing 10 percent approval by the end of his term; conservative Lee Myung-bak (2008-2013) might be the exception in that he saw a swift initial drop in the first quarter of his term and then stayed fairly steady for the next few years. While these patterns may be unsurprising to longtime watchers of Korean politics, the drop in approval for Moon’s Democratic Party still has some important political consequences for the near term for domestic politics, particularly since his party only holds a slim plurality of seats (128) in the National Assembly. The conservative Liberty Party (which subsumed the popular Ahn Chul-soo’s People’s Party early 2018) and the right-wing Bareunmirae Party hold 114 and 29 seats, respectively. The apparent failure of Moon and his party to accomplish key campaign promises — including electoral reform and economic policies that were a key part of his platform — have cast a shadow on his party’s calls for change and progress following Park Geun-hye’s impeachment.

Moon has invested a lot of energy in the diplomatic process with North Korea. How does the South Korean public see these efforts, and what impact have the ups and downs of North Korea diplomacy had on Moon’s personal popularity?

According to the Asan Institute of Policy Studies, as of January 2019, approximately 55 percent of South Koreans surveyed believed that denuclearization of North Korea was possible — a notable decline from last summer’s 75 percent who believed it would be possible following the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore but in line with March 2018’s attitudes toward prospects for denuclearization. Of course, this can be further broken down into political identification — conservatives polled were more pessimistic about denuclearization prospects than progressives, and in fact they were more pessimistic in January 2019 than in March 2018, which J. James Kim et al. in a study for the Asan Institute chalk up to a heightened sense of expectations following the Singapore Summit. 

Despite negativity toward security affairs vis-à-vis North Korea, there is widespread support for increased people-to-people and cultural exchanges with North Korea. Moon sees a popularity spike anytime he conducts high-level engagement with Pyongyang, and he often returns home with Kim Jong Un’s promises to close missile testing sites or plan more reunions for separated families.

U.S.-South Korea relations have also seen some peaks and valleys under Moon, related both to the North Korea issue and to heated negotiations over South Korea’s burden sharing in the alliance. How much public support is there for the U.S.-South Korea alliance, and have those attitudes changed over the past two years?

From an instrumental perspective, Seoul recognizes that North Korea’s asymmetric weapons capabilities necessitate continued reliance on U.S. extended deterrence. But there’s also widespread recognition among younger South Koreans today that North Korea remains antagonistic toward the South and suspicions permeate even during these periods of decreased tension. The majority of the South Korean public currently supports the U.S.-ROK military alliance: According to the Asan Institute of Policy Studies, approximately 68 percent of South Koreans polled supported keeping the same level of U.S. troops. 

However, it’s important to note that the level of support dropped nearly 10 percentage points from the years prior (2014-2018), during which time it enjoyed between a 76 and 82 percent approval rating, among the highest of all U.S. allies. As Scott Snyder aptly point out in a policy brief published in April, during the period of inter-Korean reconciliation in the mid-2000s, U.S.-ROK relations were quite strained. Support for the alliance in South Korea hovered in the 40th percentile and candlelight protests across the country protested continued U.S. troop presence after a U.S. tank accident killed two Korean girls in 2002. In other words, often periods of inter-Korean thaw in tensions are paired with a decrease in support for the alliance, but in this case the swing has not been as nearly as severe as in past comparable moments.

Domestically, the economy continues to be a nagging issue for Moon, as it has been for previous presidents. Two years in, how would you evaluate Moon’s economic approach thus far?

Besides his moves for greater engagement with North Korea, Moon’s platform during his campaign in 2017 largely centered on domestic economic issues. Official statistics corroborate the growing sense of inequality that has dominated domestic politics for the past decade: according to Statistics Korea (as reported by the Korea Herald), the household income of the poorest fifth of households in South Korea dropped 7 percent year-on-year in 2018, while the top fifth rose nearly 9 percent. There’s also been a growing recognition that the government needs to take action on the issue of the elderly poor; as of 2011 almost half (48.6 percent) of citizens over the age of 65 live in poverty, according to the OECD — which the Miracle on the Han River has tended to neglect in service of national developmental goals. 

Moon’s campaign brought the issue of economics to the fore, including such strategies as minimum wage increases, improvements in corporate governance, and support for SMEs [small and medium enterprises] and self-employed citizens. However, the overall sense among South Korean voters is he hasn’t been able to deliver on these promises. Income inequality has stagnated, small businesses balked at wage regulations (which have been put on the back burner), and the Moon administration’s domestic and foreign political aspirations have limited conglomerate regulations because he needs their political and economic heft for the macro-level promises he’s made.

There have also been a few political scandals within Moon’s party, including the conviction of South Gyeongsang Governor Kim Kyoung-soo for an online opinion rigging scandal and bribery accusations against the Korean ambassador to Russia – along with charges of a government cover-up. Obviously these pale in comparison to the influence-peddling scandal that saw former President Park Geun-hye impeached, but such incidents – while not tied to Moon directly – could damage his claim to be a clean politician. How much of an impact are these accusations having on the Moon administration?

Parties in South Korea are famously associated with a charismatic leader — which allows for their collective success or, as has just as often been the case, their disbandment and renaming under a new political head. As the public opinion polls show, Moon already faces increasing dissatisfaction in specific issue areas — especially as far as economic regulation and political reform are concerned. These tasks require an immense amount of political capital and leverage within the National Assembly and the highly technocratic and networked national bureaucracy, and political scandals related to his party only impede Moon’s goals.

When Moon came to office, with the country still reeling from the Park scandal, he placed a high priority on constitutional reform to limit presidential power while also allowing presidents to serve two four-year terms (South Korean presidents are currently limited to one five-year term). What are the prospects for Moon’s constitutional reform vision?

Moon’s constitutional reform vision seems to have hit a bumpy road due to parliamentary politicking more than popular disapproval. The current constitution set the presidency at one five-year term in 1987 at the moment of overthrowing autocratic rule. The reform is supposed to address what Hyung-A Kim calls the culture of the “authoritarian presidency” that has been characteristic of even South Korea’s democratically elected leaders, wherein the executive has undue power over the legislative branches via institutional and structural mechanisms. Politicians and the public alike agree that reform is overdue, but it is the manner and timing of reform that is under dispute. Last year Moon sought to revise the presidency to a four-year term with the possibility of one re-election. The opposition parties proposed a “semi-presidential system” wherein administrative duties would be divided between president and prime minister. The parties failed to compromise and since last summer progress on the issue has stalled. As it stands, reform seems unlikely due mostly to parliamentary deadlock more than anything.