President Lee Jae-myung will hold a news conference this week as sinking approval ratings leave him facing a crisis of leadership. He is expected to lay out in detail his approach to major issues in politics, diplomacy, the economy and policy. The most pressing tasks are the controversy over inadequate vetting in his second cabinet reshuffle, instability in the housing market, and the disarray in the justice system caused by stripping prosecutors of investigative powers altogether. Also politically fraught are the dispute over pressure from within the president's own camp to drop the criminal charges against him, and the question of whether a sitting president could serve a second term under a constitutional amendment. Whether the government regains momentum depends on how reasonable and commonsensical the solutions he offers on these matters turn out to be.
The trouble is that whatever course the president sets is likely to be shaken by infighting between hard-liners within the ruling camp and his own loyalists. Lee had in fact settled on attorney Kim Ji-yong, a former deputy chief of the Gwangju High Prosecutors' Office, as his nominee to lead the new Major Crimes Investigation Agency, yet ordered additional vetting, according to accounts on the 14th. That appears connected to a broadside from Gyeonggi Province Governor Choo Mi-ae, an ally of the ruling camp, who asked whether "it is democratization if someone who was in the same boat as Han Dong-hoon becomes the first head of the Major Crimes Investigation Agency" and demanded to know "why we are being carried along by these forces and agonizing over it." It has come to the point where Democratic Party leader Kim Min-seok has voiced concern that the situation may be "heading toward something resembling a portent of the period when forces inside and outside joined hands to try to impeach President Roh Moo-hyun as he was settling into his first year." Little wonder that warnings of a lame-duck presidency persist inside and outside politics.
Lee should use this news conference as an opportunity to clear up the policy disarray and undertake a sweeping overhaul of the ruling camp. He must rein in the hard-liners who are destabilizing his centrist pragmatism, return to the original pledge to be a "president for all," and soothe public sentiment with policy results. In that spirit, he should first deal firmly with the status of Justice Minister nominee Kim Seung-won, who is embroiled in allegations including influence-peddling over approval of a clinical trial for a new drug, and resolve instability in the greater Seoul housing market through bipartisan cooperation on supply. The disarray in the justice system should be contained by making active use of prosecutors with the requisite expertise, and he must state a clear position on the second-term question and the dispute over dropping the charges. The answers lie in the principles of the rule of law, liberal democracy and the market economy set out in the Constitution.
