South Korea’s One-Term Trap

Lee Myung-Bak has had a very public flameout. Since taking office five months ago, South Korea's new president—a CEO-style leader who won a landslide election last December—has seen his power base collapse amid massive demonstrations that have hobbled the country. The troubles began within weeks of Lee's Inauguration, when he tried to push through a controversial beef-import deal with the United States. The president claimed the pact would boost growth by leading to a broader free-trade accord, but his opponents argued it would expose local consumers to mad-cow-tainted American meat and they took to the streets. Soon the protests spread to also target Lee's wide-ranging plans for educational, media and economic reforms—halting the so-called Bulldozer in his tracks so convincingly that, barely 100 days into his five-year term, analysts are calling him a lame duck.

What may be most remarkable about Lee's fall from grace is how common a story it is for South Korea. His predecessor, Roh Moo Hyun, was impeached after just a year at the helm (though he limped on to complete his term). Kim Dae Jung, Roh's forerunner, also ended his tenure deeply unpopular, despite his deft response to the Asian financial crisis and a breakthrough visit to North Korea. And two of Kim's three predecessors were tried, convicted and sentenced to jail for corruption after leaving the Blue House. Indeed, the track record for South Korean presidents is so poor that the young democracy has produced no elder statesmen whose reputations outlive their service.

The problem rests not with the men but the institution they occupy. South Korea, the world's 12th-largest economy, is one of the few modern democracies to limit its chief executives to a single term. The rule was created for good reasons back in 1987: to prevent the return of authoritarian strongmen. At that, it's succeeded. But in a good demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, it has also rendered the presidency perpetually unstable, turning governance into a sprint, not a marathon.

The problems with the current system manifest in a variety of ways. Unlike in the United States—a system Korea's Constitution drafters sought to emulate—Korean presidents have little time or impetus for consensus building or compromise because they're forced from the get-go to focus on legacy issues, not re-election. They typically enjoy just the briefest of honeymoons and then move too aggressively, making enemies before they have a chance to learn to smoothly manipulate the levers of power.

Lee's troubled tenure shows how the one-term trap works. Because the former Hyundai executive and popular Seoul mayor never faced a serious challenge for the presidency, he spent the year before assuming office crafting the new programs he planned to implement, rather than listening to the people. And his huge electoral victories—he won the December election by the biggest margin in Korean history (5.3 million votes), and then scored big again in April when his Grand National Party gained an absolute majority in Parliament—seemed to send him the wrong message. The conservative Lee assumed that his victories meant that liberals like his predecessor, Roh, were a spent force in Korea, and that the public wholeheartedly embraced Lee's neoliberal, pro-globalization agenda. So he hastily concluded the beef deal without realizing that he was handing his enemies a potent wedge issue. "President Lee didn't bother to reach out" to his opponents or their supporters, says Choi Jin, head of the Institute of Presidential Leadership in Seoul. Instead, "Lee tried to run the country as if he was running a company."

In retrospect, Lee's haste seems explained by the fact that he was paying more attention to the ticking clock than the political landscape. His transition team quickly laid out various major reform initiatives, including a broad opening of markets, plans to shift the language of instruction in high schools from Korean to English and massive public-works projects to spur economic growth. But these ran into trouble even before Lee took office. His public-approval rating, which peaked above 80 percent after his December election, had slipped into the 50s by the time he took the oath two months later (making him the first Korean president-elect to see his approval rate fall before inauguration). Park Hee-tae, chairman of the ruling Grand National Party, sums up President Lee's problem in a single word: "speeding."