The newest member of this rogues’ gallery is none other than President Roh Moo Hyun. Elected barely a year ago on his promise to transform national politics, the 56-year-old former human-rights lawyer has proved disappointingly familiar in office. In addition to his practical failings–a greenhorn cabinet, poor management of the economy and flip-flops on key policy issues–he has become embroiled in a widening campaign-funding scandal that’s ruined his clean-hands reputation. On the defensive, Roh recently vowed: “I am willing to retire from politics if our illegal election-campaign money exceeded one tenth of that for the [opposition] Grand National Party.” His declaration shocked supporters who once believed their champion above condoning criminal behavior, petty or otherwise.
Just three months before National Assembly elections seen as a mandate on his shaky administration, Roh’s future looks bleak. His support base has virtually disintegrated. The remnants reside in the small, newly established Woori Party, which split from the then ruling Millennium Democrats in November and now controls just 15 percent of the Legislature. Roh’s own approval rating has fallen from 80 percent at its zenith eight months ago to around 27 percent today. Bitter ex-supporters are legion. “Roh promised that he could stop Korea’s money politics,” says Hwang Tae Young, a 33-year-old banker. “I now regret that I believed him.”
Roh is a Rhee in the making. And his fall is especially damaging because he had energized a young electorate that, dismayed by the scandals of his predecessors, had threatened to withdraw from politics altogether. Just last week it was reported that a businessman with long ties to Roh had told prosecutors that he personally handed the candidate’s aide $25,000 to help fund his 2002 campaign. Such news doesn’t sit well with the throngs of youngsters who heeded Roh’s call to “break the old political paradigm” by voting him into office. “They don’t jump on the bandwagon anymore,” says Kim Woosang, a political scientist at Yonsei University in Seoul. “Our situation is terrible, and the students, like all of us, are very tired.”
It’s no secret that every modern Korean presidency has ended either in death or disgrace. So why, cynics might ask, should Roh’s be any different? Rhee, for example, fell in a popular uprising and died in exile in Hawaii. Strongman Park Chung Hee’s 18-year reign ended with a bullet from his own spy chief. Presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, both former generals, were jailed for mutiny after leaving office, while Presidents Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung, both former dissidents, had sons imprisoned for influence peddling.
Roh’s rise and fall may have the same mascot: a yellow piggy bank. Thousands of these cute plastic animal figures circulated at campaign rallies in 2002, passed to garner donations. Called Piggy Banks of Hope, they embodied Roh’s appeal to low-income people. His official Web site brimmed with sad but inspiring stories about folks who skipped meals or refused medication so they could chip in a few coins. Underpinning the whole scheme was Roh’s pledge to stay clean while besting well-heeled political opponents funded lavishly by Korea Inc.
Prosecutors have knocked Roh from that moral high ground. Several of his key aides and associates now stand charged with taking $5 million from leading conglomerates both before and after the election. In one instance, $25,000 allegedly changed hands at a meeting Roh himself attended. It matters little to his disaffected supporters that the enemy camp also collected fortunes in illegal contributions, some of it delivered in cash to a key GNP leader at a parking garage in the dead of night. “The piggy-bank campaign was a fraud,” says 37-year-old secretary Kim Sang Hee. “Roh promised politics free from money, but he was no different from other politicians.”
The youth vote that Roh so successfully courted is perhaps the most fragile casualty; without their engagement, old-school pols may again control the system. Even some younger politicians have grown disillusioned. Oh Se Hoon, a hugely popular GNP lawmaker elected in a landslide four years ago, recently announced he would give up his seat in the National Assembly rather than run for a second term. “I had high hopes for Korean politics, but I was wrong,” says the 43-year-old politician.
Those who still support the president claim he’s the lesser of two evils. They downplay the fund-raising scandal, portraying it as either a plot hatched by enemies or a legacy of the past. The judiciary’s aggressive investigation, they say, proves that the Blue House now stands committed to exposing money politics even when it infects Roh’s own party. At a rally last month to commemorate his election victory, the president told supporters that his grass-roots campaign had become a model for U.S. presidential hopeful Howard Dean. At the Blue House, Roh erected a meter-high sculpture of a yellow pig to mark his first year in office. “I am a little disappointed, but I still believe in him,” says Ki Ta Hyun, a 31-year-old office worker, expressing lukewarm sentiments typical inside the Roh camp today.
On Jan. 10 prosecutors arrested six sitting lawmakers from ruling and opposition parties on various corruption charges. Among them: the president’s campaign manager, Chung Dae Chul, who now stands charged with accepting a $250,000 bribe from Daewoo Construction. The opposition has renewed calls for Roh’s resignation. But as South Korean voters have learned at their peril, even that wouldn’t guarantee that the country’s next president would prove cleaner–let alone capable of avoiding the fate of those who came before him.
