I wonder if South Korean president Lee Myung-bak will be able to get his government back on track? His record might indicate that he’s a great businessman, which is probably the reason he got elected, but so far he seems to be terrible as a politician. Will he be able to get back some of the public confidence, or will he continue to be as unpopular or even more so as the previous South Korean president at the end of his term?
It’s as if his administration had no one to do any sort of sanity checks on their ideas. It would have been really easy to see that a lot of their plans regarding the grand waterway project or English education would have been strongly opposed or deeply unpopular, but there seemed to be a lack of effort to sensitize the public or rival political parties with them. And while the public’s reaction over the beef importation crisis seems to be rather over the top, the administration was so focused on getting the free trade agreement passed that they completely missed public sentiment over the issue.
Now all of his cabinet is offering to resign, which at least is an indication that they realize how bad the problems are. The only question is whether their successors will be able to do a better job, and whether the problems are with the current administration or are they the kind that are endemic with the current situation in South Korea, so that anyone would have been faced with similar problems.