Following president-elect Park Geun-hye’s nomination of Chung Hong-won for prime minister just before Lunar New Year, she appears set to move ahead with the bulk of the appointments for the main Blue House secretarial positions and cabinet posts. With less than two weeks before her Feb. 25 inauguration, the reality is that given how the appointment process has gone thus far, there is more reason for concern than anticipation regarding how the rest of the process will play out.

It is no exaggeration to say that Chung Hong-won, who was nominated following the withdrawal of the first nominee, Kim Yong-joon, is a microcosm of the problems with Park’s appointments. Beginning with the fact that he is from Gyeongsang Province, just as the president-elect is, the appointment is at odds with Park’s stated goals of harmony and unity. In previous administrations, it has been extremely rare for the president and the prime minister to hail from the same region. It is also difficult to believe that Chung was appointed based on merit. Many predict that he would be little better than a non-descript paper-shuffling prime minister. This is also hard to reconcile with Park’s pledge to delegate more responsibility to her prime minister. No wonder people are grumbling that someone more fit for being Minister of Justice was nominated as Prime Minister.

The revolving-door appointments are another problem. First Kim, and now Chung, are people that Park has used before and is nominating again. If Park fails to consider the wide variety of talent available and starts placing her own people around her from the very beginning of her administration, she will run out of options before she knows it. When a president is selecting the cabinet, it is important to choose a team of people who can get the work done, but one must also select innovative figures who satisfy the expectations of the public to see plans for how the government will be run. A prime minister who is little more than a presidential aide will not easily meet the people’s expectations.

It is also worrisome that Park has nominated former Minister of Defense Kim Jang-soo as head of the National Security Office chief and Park Heung-ryul, former Army chief of staff, as head of the Presidential Security Service. Both of those are minister-level positions. The very act of appointing someone who served as the minister of defense as the head of the National Security Office, which is expected to become the control tower for diplomatic and security policies for the new government, is unusual.

While the appointment of Kim as head of the National Security Office appears to have been based on Park’s value of basing her North Korea policy on security, there is a concern that the balance of foreign policy and security policies will be one-sided, with an emphasis on security. More important than anything else is for Park to use subsequent foreign policy and security-related appointments to build a team that will establish balance and harmony in her policies.

As the Head of the Presidential Security Service has been raised to a minister-level position, the fact that a former army chief of staff was appointed to this position brings to mind the Yushin period. Since times have changed, it does not appear that a Security Service chief who is from the army will be a heavyweight who dominates the Blue House.

Nevertheless, it is also troubling that rumors are circulating that Park Ji-man, a graduate of the military academy and a relative of Park’s, is included in the list of potential appointees. Never again should someone from the military academy wield power behind the scenes.

Park’s insistence on choosing a prime minister from the legal profession and her appointment of people from the military academy in important posts in the Blue House is most simply described as a style of appointment that harkens back to the past. It could also be described as a resurrection of the practice of filling the administration with graduates of the military academy and people from the legal profession, which was common from the third republic to the fifth republic.

The continuous failures in Park’s appointments are largely responsible for the fact that her approval rating dipped below 50% just before the Lunar New Year. It has been said that appointments are everything. Park needs recognize that if she exhibits the same stubborn arrogance throughout the rest of her appointments, it will inevitably become a huge obstacle for her as she tries to lead the country.

　

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]