Personnel decisions reveal what an administration feels pressed by. President Lee Jae-myung's latest cabinet reshuffle is a case in point. What stands out first, ahead of any individual candidate's flaws, is the mark of haste. Appointments driven by time pressure and political necessity eventually come back as a burden on governance.
The backdrop is not hard to guess. A split among supporters exposed during the ruling party's national convention, the "neglect of the base" argument stoked by Rhyu Si-min, the abolition of supplementary investigative powers and the justice minister's resignation all piled up into confusion. The president's approval rating is also on a downward path. Kim Min-seok's election as party leader gave the president room to breathe, but it also confirmed that internal resistance to the "New Lee Jae-myung" line is far from negligible.
Traces of that struggle are plainly visible in this reshuffle. Signals had to be sent quickly and the situation contained. The problem is that in rushing to deliver a political message, the administration neglected the actual task of choosing people.
The nomination of Yong Hye-in as minister of gender equality and family is the clearest example. The political meaning of the pick seems obvious. It reads as a conciliatory gesture extended to progressives who felt sidelined, and as a message that the administration will look after young people and women.
But choosing Yong as the vehicle for that message is hard to understand. Whatever her symbolic value, a closer look at her record raises an entirely different set of questions.
Yong won a proportional representation seat twice through the maneuver of a satellite party, which runs counter to the purpose of the mixed-member proportional system. She effectively ran a party funded by state subsidies as a family enterprise. None of it was illegal. But a record of exploiting gaps in the system to suit her own purposes offers no sign of the values and principles a "young politician born in 1990" ought to uphold.
Criticism that this was a bad appointment is coming from within her own camp. Pressure from the Justice Party and other progressive parties to "sort out her position" is mounting. If a signal sent to placate the left is not welcomed by the left itself, the appointment has already failed politically. All that remains is the question of when the failure is acknowledged.
As it happens, conservative figures Lee had brought in also exited around the same time, leaving a bitter aftertaste. Among them were Lee Suk-yeon, former chairman of the presidential committee on national unity, and Lee Byung-tae, vice chairman of the presidential committee on regulatory rationalization, both recruited to broaden the administration's appeal to conservatives. The gains from that outreach were short-lived, and in the end the philosophical gap in governance was never narrowed, leaving only wounds on both sides. That is how risky appointments made in pursuit of political symbolism can be.
The nomination of Kim Seung-won as justice minister, which is now shaking the political landscape, is hard to defend against the charge of haste in vetting. Consider what the post of justice minister, charged with judicial reform, involves. Even Chung Sung-ho, the former justice minister and one of the president's closest allies, described the job as grinding enough to wear down one's teeth amid conflicts among countless interest groups. If this weighty post, certain to draw concentrated political attack, was filled on the strength of the "sitting lawmakers never lose" myth, that is a complacent judgment.
Had the presidential office's vetting system worked properly, it should at the very least have had a clear grasp of the central allegations surrounding the nominee's suspended indictment and how they came about. The nominee's explanation that his approach to the drug safety agency was the "delivery of a public-interest petition" is difficult to accept. If he did not know the company's chief executive and was not clear on what the treatment even was, how could a member of the National Assembly file a clinical trial petition with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety? The episode lays bare, under the wrapping of public interest, the covert collusion binding a lawmaker, a broker and a company looking for a quick score.
The presidential office plans to watch these nominees through their confirmation hearings. The intent of giving them a chance to explain themselves deserves respect, but it should not hold out any hope that the matter "will soon be forgotten." Choosing the wrong person to escape an immediate crisis can cost far more time in governing later.
This is also the moment to overhaul the presidential office's vetting system. Keeping personnel decisions tightly under wraps is a strength of the Lee administration, but there is no shortage of criticism that it magnifies the harm of closed-door appointments. Rep. Yoon Kun-young of the Democratic Party of Korea, a former director of the presidential situation room, said the presidential office "needs to take another look at its vetting unit." The point, presumably, is to examine whether too few pairs of eyes are looking over the vetting.
