The approval rating of South Korea's President Park Geun-hye is currently at a record low of 4 per cent. Millions have demonstrated for the past six weekends calling for her resignation, and nothing less than her immediate resignation will suffice. Park's offer to resign by April has been spurned.
This week at parliamentary hearings South Korea's most prominent corporate chiefs, the heads of South Korea's biggest "chaebols", or industrial conglomerates, including Samsung, Lotte and Hyundai, insisted they had not sought favours when they made contributions to two foundations at the heart of the biggest scandal since democracy was restored in the late 1980s, even as one of them acknowledged it was hard to say "no" to the government.
Choi Soon-sil, the woman accused of currying favour with Park to gain influence and money, is suspected of extorting the chaebols and subsequently siphoning off €62 million from the foundations for various personal projects. She has been ordered to appear before parliament but claims she is too ill.
The controversial “friendship” with Park is bizarre. Choi is a daughter of a shamanistic religious cult leader, the Rasputin-like, Choi Tae-min, who befriended Park in the 1970s, when the latter’s father, military dictator Park Chung-hee, was in power. The relationship was used then, it is alleged, to collect bribes on a grand scale from businessess. When the latter was assasinated, Choi’s father persuaded Park that she could communicate with her dead father through him, and both Chois continued to exercise influence over her.
Park’s refusal to resign in the face of inevitable impeachment, even under growing pressure from her own conservative Saenuri party, effectively leaves Asia’s fourth-largest economy without a credible government, a reality that is beginning to worry both allies and markets.
Pro-impeachment lawmakers were believed to have the 200 votes necessary to pass the bill, potentially as early as today. If successful the constitutional court has six months to rule on whether the impeachment is warrantedduring which Park’s presidential powers would be suspended, and Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn would step in as acting president.