hankyoreh

As South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol enters his second year in office, half of Koreans think that conflict and division between parties and voters are increasing, instead of Korean society moving toward unity, a new poll has found. Koreans identified the president and his political opposition as being responsible for that division.

A resounding majority of respondents said that Korean society is moving in a negative direction in various areas, including democracy, sounding an alarm for the future.

Those were some of the results of a telephone survey of 1,015 adult men and women around the country carried out by Global Research, a professional polling organization, on behalf of the Hankyoreh, on Dec. 26-27.

When respondents were asked what they think about conflict and division between the ruling and opposition parties in comparison to the past, 50.5% said such division had increased, 12.5% said it had decreased, and 34.6% said it was at a similar level.

Around the same percentage of respondents (51.0%) said that division between voters who support each party was higher than in the past, while 12.6% said that division was lower than in the past, and 33.8% said it remained relatively unchanged.

Conflict between the two parties has sharpened recently, with the current National Assembly earning a black mark for the biggest delay in passing next year’s budget bill since the National Assembly Act was overhauled in 2014. It appears that supporters of the two parties are just as suspicious of each other.

When survey respondents who said that inter-party division has grown worse were asked a follow-up question about which political actors were chiefly responsible for that division, the percentages who selected President Yoon Suk-yeol (38.4%) and the main opposition Democratic Party (34.7%) fell within the margin of error. Other responses were the ruling People Power Party (15.6%) and the Justice Party (0.6%).

When asked whether Yoon exhibited unifying leadership compared to past presidents, 55.2% of respondents said he is not, while 25.8% said he is and 17.4% said his leadership is at a comparable level.

A question about whether voters still support their choice in the past presidential election elicited similar levels of support for Yoon (77.8%) and his opponent Lee Jae-myung (74.8%), head of the Democratic Party. That suggests that the public remains sharply divided today, nine months after Yoon edged out Lee by just 0.73 points in the election on March 9.

Further reinforcing that interpretation is the fact that support for Democratic Party candidates (45.7%) and People Power Party candidates (44.1%) was equally balanced, within the margin of error, in a question about whom respondents intend to supp

ort in the general election in April 2024.

Given these divisions in Korean society, respondents’ outlook on the future was not bright. When asked about their thoughts on Korean society in respect to democracy and other areas, a larger share of respondents (58.3%) said that Korea is moving in a negative direction than those who said it’s moving in a positive direction (39.7%).

On a different topic, 41.5% of respondents rated Yoon’s job performance highly, while 54.9% said the president is doing a bad job. The PPP topped party approval ratings at 39.7%, followed by the Democratic Party at 34.2% and the Justice Party at 4.8%.

More details are available on the National Election Survey Deliberation Commission website.

By Song Chae Kyung-hwa, staff reporter

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