Why leave the first lady risk unattended?

Choi Hoon
The author is the chief editor of the JoongAng Ilbo.

The new year has arrived, but we are not in the mood to exchange joyful good wishes. Ominous signs loom over the political front as we are being sucked into the black hole of chaos. The majority Democratic Party (DP) has passed a motion to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate first lady Kim Keon-hee’s alleged manipulation of stock prices of car dealership Deutsch Motors. President Yoon Suk Yeol will most likely veto the motion as soon as it arrives at its door.

The DP teamed up with the minority opposition Justice Party to attack the first lady — deemed the Achilles’ heel of the ruling power — to damage the governing People Power Party (PPP) ahead of the April 10 parliamentary election. Few know the real story behind the 2009–2012 stock manipulation scandal and many do not attach great significance to the story, either. Nevertheless, a majority of the people — more specifically, up to 70 percent in a recent poll — do not want the president to exercise his veto power.

The PPP, currently under the interim leadership of former Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon, defined the special act as an “evil law infringing on the people’s right to choose” by pointing to the provisions that restrict the authority to recommend a special counsel to the opposition and allow regular briefing on the investigation progress mostly timed with the April election. But the reasoning should not make a fool of the 70 percent who still approve of the special investigation.

What went wrong? Yoon, a former prosecutor general, singled out his meeting with Kim at nearly 50 and marrying her in 2012 as the happiest moments of his life. But his beloved wife often embarrassed his presidential campaign. She ended up apologizing for lying about her academic and career credentials and promised not to act out of sync with public sentiment. She vowed to strictly keep her role as the president’s wife if her husband became elected.

Earlier in the summer of 2021, PPP politicians frequented the home of Yoon after his resignation as the prosecutor general in order to persuade him to run for president, given his firm stance against the pressure from the sitting power. At that time, visitors remember being awed by a comment by Yoon’s wife. Kim, seated next to Yoon, asked the politicians if they could protect her if “we” joined the party.

President Yoon Suk Yeol and first lady Kim Keon Hee wave before boarding the Korean Air Force One for the president’s state visit to the Netherlands on Dec. 11, at Seoul Air Base in Seongnam, Gyeonggi. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

“The mention of ‘we’ is stuck in my head,” said one of the politicians. Another key party member recalled a scene of his visit, where Kim turned to her husband and advised him to do what the guest told him to do because her husband did not know much about politics. Party members got the impression that the wife played a substantial role in making her husband the president. In a taped conversation that went public just before the presidential election in March 2022, she called her husband “a completely innocent fool for whom I have to take care of everything.”

There are no laws defining the rights, responsibilities, and duties of the first lady. As she can be both a public and private figure, problems can occur when the boundary becomes blurry. When Yoon expressed strong confidence in handling his wife, the presidential office lacked the function of an internal inspection team for the first lady and her family. Kim caused a ripple in June 2022, a month after Yoon was inaugurated as president. At that time, a critic accused the first lady of bringing one of the staffers of her private company to the home of former President Roh Moo-hyun when she paid a visit to the place. The critic claimed the suspicious staffer was a shaman. Although the claim was found to be untrue, the episode suggested public suspicion about the first lady’s faith in shamanism and geomancy.

Scandals tailed the presidential couple since Yoon took power. Kim’s acquaintances were found to have been recruited to deal with protocol and PR affairs during her husband’s overseas trips. When Kim invited female PPP lawmakers to the presidential residence, a member asked her to use her influence to help them get nominated for the next election. The PPP leadership had a hard time trying to brush off the remark as a joke.

That’s not all. The presidential office and the PPP had to suffer after the media reported Kim on a shopping spree in luxury boutiques with an entourage of security guards when she accompanied her husband to Lithuania as a guest at a NATO summit.

Kim’s acceptance of a Dior handbag from a pro-Pyongyang Korean American pastor a few months later was a critical mistake. The secretly taped conversation released on YouTube raised serious questions about the dignity a first lady should have. She was heard saying, “What I have seen from here (presidential office), politics are all bad […] I want to act proactively on inter-Korean issues once the public’s interest in me subsides […] As the two Koreas must be united, there could be a big role for you (pastor) and me.”

The majority 70 percent support a special investigation on the first lady regardless of poisonous articles of the special motion to dig into her suspicions. The poll results also represent a public call for action to clear deepening doubts over the first lady. It could be better to reintroduce the special inspector system and allow the majority party to name one to keep watch on the first lady. Above all, Kim should sincerely apologize for the Dior bag incident. Conservative voters demand a radical reform action in the likes of the June 29, 1987 declaration — where the military regime offered to adopt the direct presidential election system — from the PPP. Can all this be an impossible mission for emergency committee chair Han Dong-hoon?