South Korea’s Moon rising after Park sank

The front-runner to succeed South Korea’s impeached president Park Geun-Hye after her dismissal over a corruption scandal is a former Special Forces soldier, pro-democracy activist and human rights lawyer. The irony is that Moon Jae-In of the Democratic Party was once chief of staff to left-leaning president Roh Moo-Hyun, who committed suicide in 2009 after being questioned over graft allegations. Even so, Roh invariably polls as South Korea’s most beloved ex-president, with other former heads of state generally considered much more corrupt.

South Korea must hold a presidential election within 60 days and Moon, a former Democratic Party leader narrowly beaten by Park in 2012, has long been leading the polls. A Realmeter survey this week put him on 36.1 percent, with his nearest rival, acting president Hwang Kyo-Ahn trailing far behind at 14.2 percent. “He is a liberal champion with good chances of winning the next presidential election,” Park Kie-Duck, former head of the private Sejong Institute said. The 64year-old has promised to curb the concentration of economic power in the hands of the chaebols, the family-oriented business groups whose ties to government have been exposed in the wideranging scandal that saw Park impeached. But the analyst sounded a warning: “He lacks political acumen,” he said.

“He is too soft to cope with the dirty games in realpolitik.” According to conservative critics, Moon is also too soft towards North Korea. Nuclear-armed Pyongyang launched a flight of four missiles towards Japan this week in what it said was a drill for an attack on US bases in the country. But in December Moon said that if elected, he was willing to visit North Korea ahead of the United States, the South’s security guarantor.

Facing criticism, he said he meant defusing tensions with the North was an issue of utmost urgency. A US missile defense system, THAAD, is being deployed to the South in the face of threats from the North, infuriating Beijing, which has imposed a series of measures seen as economic retaliation. — AFP