KIM: Political Woes Mount

(KIM, from Page 1)

down the polls. A survey for the Munhwa Ilbo showed that 38 percent now support the opposition Grand National Party, and only 28 percent the ruling Millennium Democratic Party. Again, defections among Koreans in their 30s and 40s, groups heavily affected by the financial and corporate restructuring, were striking.

"As you can see with the gold collection drive," Professor Hwang said, "Korean people are very loyal to greater causes such as reviving the national economy" He was referring to early 1998, when Koreans were called upon to sacrifice for the sake of national recovery, and responded by selling some 4,290 kilograms of gold, including personal jewelry, for the use of the central bank.

The nation's often militant labor sector has grudgingly gone with the reform plan, even though it breaks with a tradition of lifelong employment, because it has been persuaded that survival of one's company means survival of one's job. But the unemployment rate continues stubbornly to stay above 4 percent. In the days of lifetime employment before the 1997 financial crisis, the unemployment rate stuck around 2 percent, a level tantamount to full employment, for a decade.

Labor's patience is wearing thin, and so is the government's. Increasingly violent demonstrations by laid-off workers culminated in a brutal police crackdown in April at Daewoo Motor Co.'s Bupyeong factory in Inchon, the automaker's largest assembly line, where 1,750 workers were laid off in February.

"We will open fire on the government, which to date has been uncooperative with the labor market in restructuring," the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, a militant labor grouping, said. It plans to launch a series of rallies this month. Joining the unionists will be intellectuals and other forces that had kept quiet for the past three years. Now they are pooling their energies to attack the president.

Political watchers with their fingers on the public pulse say that the president's waning popularity is in fact only a new facet of the regionalism that has long underlain Korean politics. Mr. Kim is the first president to hail from the Honam region, or the Cholla provinces. Most past leaders, whether military strongmen or elected presidents, were from the Youngnam region or the Kyongsang provinces. Developmental funds tended to be plowed into the president's home region, arousing antagonism elsewhere.

The military regimes' export-based strategy for economic development veiled its partiality to favored provinces that were promoted as industrial bases and primary recruiting grounds in business contracting and government employment.

The Kim administration's slogan of "a prepared president," among other things, also refers to the long time Mr. Kim has spent as opposition leader under military regimes and presidents from the Kyongsang provinces.

The financial crisis has discredited economic bubbles and political rhetoric. Thus, the reform-weary public is seen as likely to revert to the regionalism factor in next year's presidential election. But economic disappointment will be the underlying reason for the shift.

"It will be about the conservative approach versus the reform-oriented" said Mo Jong-Ryn, professor of political economy at Yonsei University's Graduate School of International Studies. "In short, it is about the economy, or rather who can put forth a vision of the economy for the coming future."