South Korea's president fights impeachment and other demons
If she has to leave the presidential palace, it will not be the first time
AsiaDec 17th 2016 edition
OVER the past two months, as the weekly candlelit protests along Sejongno, Seoul's main boulevard, swelled from a few thousand participants to 2m, the calls bouncing off the high-rises for Park Geun-hye to step down are said to have become audible even in the Blue House, the president's official residence and office, a short distance to the north, where Ms Park had cloistered herself away. The protests look set to continue, despite Ms Park's impeachment by the National Assembly on December 9th. The Constitutional Court has six months to rule on her fate. While she waits, Ms Park has been stripped of her powers. But the protesters will not be satisfied until she is gone for good.
Aspects of Ms Park's downfall verge on soap opera. The president, by her own admission, has long been close to a woman, Choi Soon-sil, who seems to have dictated or at the least influenced her decisions on everything from handbags to affairs of state. Ms Choi has been indicted on charges of extortion, abuse of power and possession of classified documents. Of particular outrage to ordinary Koreans are accusations that she secured educational preferment for her daughter and that she held an almost Rasputin-like power over the president.
Perhaps none of this would have come into the open had not Ms Choi fallen out with a toyboy over his inattentiveness to her daughter's puppy. Ms Choi, he claims, arrogantly upbraided him for heading off to play golf, leaving the puppy alone. Embittered, he began collecting evidence against her.
The president's downfall has been swift and spectacular. But for all the jubilation on Seoul's streets—the protests, after all, brought on the impeachment—there is something sobering in Ms Park's predicament. Her story encompasses all the elements of Greek tragedy, including the downfall and suffering of a flawed but in many ways admirable person. The only element that is missing is the pity of the audience.
It is no coincidence that the Blue House, whose walls are now witness to Ms Park's despair, was also her childhood home. In 1961, when she was nine, her father, Park Chung-hee, an officer trained in the Imperial Japanese Army, seized power in a coup, ending a short-lived period of democratic rule. His strongman presidency ushered in a period of breakneck growth and development, but also harsh working conditions in South Korean sweatshops and increasing repression by the state.
In 1974 a North Korean sympathiser failed to assassinate the dictator but shot and killed his wife, Yuk Young-soo. Motherless, Ms Park became the Blue House's first lady, accompanying her father during official engagements. Five years later he too was assassinated, over a meal of whisky, sliced beef and kimchi, by his intelligence chief, Kim Jae-gyu. That was when she first left the Blue House, which she will have to do again, perhaps sooner than she expected.
It was after Yuk's death that a vulnerable Ms Park fell under the sway of a cult leader—part shaman, part pseudo-evangelist—called Choi Tae-min. He seems to have convinced Ms Park that he could contact her late mother. Kim Jae-gyu claimed at his trial that one of his motives for killing the president was concern about Choi's hold over Ms Park. Choi Soon-sil, now in jail awaiting trial, is Choi Tae-min's daughter, and has retained his influence.
Loneliness opens up chasms. At 64, Ms Park has never married. She is estranged from her younger sister and brother—so as to be immune to nepotism, she has said. She long relied on courtiers, mainly yes-men who had advised her father, but they are now trickling away—and three of her close aides have been indicted for corruption and related offences. She last met a foreign dignitary more than a month ago. She is said to eat dinner alone, a dish of self-pity and despair. "In my life's scale," she wrote in her autobiography in 1993, "the worthwhile times have never outweighed painful ones."
Duty more than desire seems to have propelled her bid for the Blue House. In the words of a former aide, "South Korea was her country, built by her father. The Blue House was her home. And the presidency was her family job." To Ms Park's critics, it is all of a piece: she is imperial, aloof and out of touch. This first hit a public nerve more than two years ago, when the president disappeared from view for seven hours on the day of a national disaster, the sinking of a ferry, the Sewol, in which 300 people died, many of them schoolchildren. One of the theories aired in recent days—and only partially denied by the Blue House—was that she spent an hour and a half of that period getting her hair done.
South Koreans have fought hard and spilled much blood for their democracy. There have been several spells of tumult since the second world war. This one, admirably, is ending without violence. Many, perhaps most, of Seoul's protesters sense a system, of education and employment, unfairly rigged against them, and of a ruler who has only reinforced the inequities. Those are sentiments that Western fans of individualism and freedom would easily recognise.
Harder to grasp, but nonetheless essential, is the disappointment that many other, particularly older, South Koreans feel. They voted for Ms Park because her presidency to them offered to reinstate an older and more certain Korean hierarchy, emblematic of her father's rule, in which everyone had their place in an organic whole—a hierarchy without shame. In this Korean imagining, which the government avidly propagates in North Korea, the leader is the parent-in-chief, whose virtues define the nation. Ms Park never became that parent-in-chief—a matter of glee in the North's propaganda and a source of great shame to South Koreans who backed her. It was always a tall order. Surrounded by the photographs and relics of her parents, she never could grow out of the predicament of being the lonely child.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "South Korea's president fights impeachment and other demons"
More from Asia
What next for Taiwan after Tsai Ing-wen's emphatic victory?
Pen, sword and scales
Criticism of the army or government lands many Burmese in court
A major modern general
India's armed forces get their biggest shake-up in decades