President Park facing a crisis of leadership, and low approval

Nearing two years in office, exceptionally low approval is remarkable due to lack of external crisis

President Park Geun-hye is facing a crisis. Before even reaching the second anniversary of her inauguration as president, her approval rating has plummeted to the 20% range. It looks like Park will find it even harder to run the country as her administration enters its third year.

An approval rating in the 20% range is news enough, but the true severity of the problem becomes clear when considered in the light of recent trends.

According to a poll by Gallup Korea, Park’s approval rating is at its worst since she took office, hitting new lows for three weeks in a row.

In a poll that ran in the first week of January, Park’s approval rating was at 40%; in just three weeks, this plunged by 11 percentage points. During the same period, the percentage of people who think that Park is dong a bad job also jumped from 51% to 63%.

As recently as the first week of November, polls showed positive assessments edging out negative assessments, 46% to 42%. But since allegations broke at the end of November that Chung Yoon-hoi had been interfering in the business of state, Park’s approval rating has continued to slide, losing 17 percentage points in the two months since then.

The upshot is that Park’s plunging approval rate is not a passing fad, but rather a lasting trend.

More evidence of how bad the crisis is the fact that the slump in Park’s approval rating is not being caused by a major disaster or some other external factor but rather because of internal factors, which is to say, her leadership.

When asked why they thought Park was doing a bad job as president, most respondents cited lack of communication, openness, and transparency (16%) and tax reforms and tax increases (16%). Other reasons cited were poor appointments (14%) and lack of follow-through or change of heart on campaign promises (9%).

While Park did organize a New Year’s press conference, she apparently failed to live up to the public’s expectation for her communication skills. Her decision to retain Blue House Chief of Staff Kim Ki-choon and the “Blue House triumvirate” of her three secretaries - even while replacing the Prime Minister - left a stain on her appointment record.

Alongside these factors, the uproar about changes to the tax code appears to have accelerated the slide of her approval rating.

To be sure, it is normal for presidents who were popular in the first part of their administration to see their approval ratings slip during their third year in office.

A graph showing public opinion polls on President Park Geun-hye’s performance. The gray line shows respondents who say she’s doing a poor job, and the red line shows respondents who say she’s doing a good job. The polls were conducted in the first, second and third weeks of Dec. 2014, and the first, second, third and fourth weeks of January. The text boxes show events that took place at those times that affected Park’s approval rating.

But Park’s approval rating two years into her term does not look good when compared to the approval ratings of previous presidents at this point. During the first quarter of his third year in office, Kim Young-sam’s average approval rating was 37%, Kim Dae-jung’s (1998-2003) was 49%, Roh Moo-hyun’s (2003-2008) was 33%, and Lee Myung-bak’s (2008-2013) was 44%.

Of course, if Park takes the second anniversary of her inauguration as an opportunity to radically change how she runs the government, her approval rating could rebound.

“President Park’s approval rating appears to have dropped as pent-up frustration came to the surface all at once. I think this is not just a temporary development, but rather a major collapse. Since her support base is not very resilient, Park is in fact very close to losing her momentum for running the government,” said Han Gwi-yeong, analyst at the Hankyoreh Institute for Social Policy.

“The fact that President Park’s approval rate dropped in such a short time without any major external factor indicates the accumulated disappointment about her attitude and her ability. Unless she fundamentally changes her leadership approach by espousing new values, she will be unable to pull up her approval rating very much,” said Kim Chun-seok, the director in charge of public opinion polling for Hankook Research.

By Im Seok-kyu, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]