South Korean President’s Leadership Style Is Seen as Factor in Scandal

A police detective who worked in the South Korean president’s office filed a report in 2014 accusing relatives and associates of an unofficial presidential adviser of meddling in state affairs.

He was promptly reassigned.

That was just the start of his troubles. After a newspaper reported some of his findings, the detective, Park Kwan-cheon, who worked as an anti-graft watchdog, was charged with leaking government documents. PresidentPark Geun-hye, who is not related to Mr. Park, accused him of “undermining national discipline.” He was convicted and spent 16 months in prison.

To opponents of the president, the case confirms that she is just like her father, the military dictator Park Chung-hee: an isolated, authoritarian leader who uses state power against critics while shielded by a small coterie of advisers.

Mr. Park is not the only official who paid for raising alarms about the adviser, Choi Soon-sil, a longtime friend of the president who is at the center of thescandalcrippling her administration. Other officials were demoted or forced to resign. At least two people, including a journalist, were prosecuted for spreading rumors that Ms. Park had a relationship with Ms. Choi’s ex-husband.

As the scandal grows, even many older South Koreans who revere Ms. Park’s father — and who were crucial to her election victory in 2012 — have turned against her. Her approval numbers have dropped to record lows, and crowds of protesters have called on her to resign. A large demonstration in Seoul was expected on Saturday.

“In the end, she turned out to be a dunderhead who couldn’t even separate public affairs from private friendships,” said Kim Ky-baek, 64, who runs a nationalist website, Minjokcorea. “What so disappointed conservatives like me is that she tainted her father’s name, rather than honoring it.”

Prosecutors have charged Ms. Choi with leveraging her ties to Ms. Park to extort millions from South Korean businesses; they have also charged one aide to Ms. Park with helping her to do so. News reports have said that Ms. Choi held considerable sway in the presidential Blue House and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, despite having no official post or background in policy. Ms. Park has said only that Ms. Choi edited some of her speeches.

In addition, Ms. Choi’s background — her father, who was also close to Ms. Park, led a fringe religious sect — has led many South Koreans to conclude that Ms. Choi wielded a sort of cultlike control over the president. Ms. Park denied this.

Such colorful accusations aside, the notion that Ms. Park relies too heavily on a few trusted aides — one of whom might one day betray her, like the intelligence chief who assassinated her father in 1979 — has been part of South Korean political discussion for years. A former cabinet minister recently compared her advisers to cockroaches, saying that they operated in the shadows.

Ms. Park’s detached leadership style may have encouraged such speculation. She holds just one news conference a year. Even after apologizing on Nov. 4 for the Choi scandal and agreeing to be questioned by investigators if asked, she took no questions from reporters. Some of her senior presidential aides said that they have never had a one-on-one policy meeting with Ms. Park.

Her government’s zealous pursuit of ideological opponents has also invited comparisons to her father’s rule. In 2014, it forced a small left-wing party to disband, on the grounds that it subscribed to North Korean ideology. A performance artist was indicted over graffiti directed toward Ms. Park that read “sayonara,” the Japanese word for goodbye.

In 2014, a Japanese reporter, Tatsuya Kato, was charged with defamation for reporting rumors that Ms. Park and Ms. Choi’s husband, himself a former parliamentary aide for Ms. Park, had been engaged in a romantic liaison during the sinking of a ferry that killed hundreds of students.Mr. Kato was later acquitted, but in 2015, a South Korean activist was imprisoned forscattering leaflets that carried the same rumor.

And officials like Mr. Park, the former police officer, have paid a price for investigating Ms. Choi or her family. In 2013, two officials at the culture and sports ministry who pursued accusations that her family interfered in the affairs of an equestrian association — Ms. Choi’s daughter is an equestrian — were banished to obscure positions and later resigned.

This summer, Lee Seok-su, a senior government auditor appointed by Ms. Park to monitor the president’s relatives and associates, was forced to resign after looking into corruption allegations involving Ms. Choi and presidential aides. Several aides sued journalists in 2014 for reporting similar allegations involving them and Ms. Choi’s husband. One of those aides was recently arrested on charges of passing on classified presidential documents to Ms. Choi.

Prosecutors arebeing pressured to expand their inquiryto include Ms. Park. In July last year, she invited 17 senior South Korean executives to the Blue House, and it has been suggested in domestic news media that she may have asked them to donate to foundations controlled by Ms. Choi.

Ms. Park’s office denied any wrongdoing tied to the meetings. It said it could not comment on matters under prosecutors’ investigation but added that many news reports were speculative.

Ms. Park has apologized twice for the Choi scandal in televised speeches, saying that she had let her guard down with a trusted friend. But she did not say whether she knew about Ms. Choi’s alleged extortion.

On the day of her second speech, however, new evidence emerged that her administration had put heavy-handed pressure on businesses in the past. MBN, a cable news channel, broadcast a recording of a 2013 telephone conversation in which a presidential aide told an executive at CJ, a food and entertainment conglomerate, that Ms. Park wanted its vice chairwoman to resign for reasons he did not specify. “We want her to quit,” the aide said. “What more explanation do you need?”

That recording, too, raised memories ofSouth Korea’s authoritarian past. One of the military dictators who succeeded Ms. Park’s father, Chun Doo-hwan, forced businesses to donate to a foundation under his control in the 1980s. Big business in South Korea remain vulnerable to political manipulation because of their murky corporate governance, said Kim Sang-jo, an economist at Hansung University in Seoul.

“What people find so outrageous and anachronistic is that a similar thing is still happening in South Korea 30 years later,” Mr. Kim said.

In a bid to regain public trust, Ms. Park recently agreed tocede some power to a prime ministerchosen by the opposition-dominated Parliament. But such moves have failed to defuse the scandal. Large protests denouncing Ms. Park have been held in central Seoul on a weekly basis.

“Poetic justice is what comes to mind,” Mr. Park, the former police officer who investigated Ms. Choi’s family in 2014, recently told reporters.

(NYC)