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President Yoon Suk-yeol speaks at a luncheon with young Korean entrepreneurs at the presidential office in Seoul on April 8, 2024. (courtesy of presidential office)

With Korea’s general election day only two days away, controversy continued to rage Monday over administration interference in the process.

In particular, President Yoon Suk-yeol has been fueling the fire with various statements and actions with the potential to influence voting. Despite critics commenting numerous times on how overt he has been about it, he shows no sign of reining himself in. It’s the sort of thing we’ve never seen before from any past president or administration.

On Monday morning, Yoon invited young CEOs and executives from ventures and startups to a luncheon meeting at the presidential office in Yongsan. The office explained that the purpose of the event was to examine the progress of “Startup Korea,” a set of government policies.

Ordinarily, such an occasion would not be an issue. But the gathering of major industry figures in one setting takes on a very different look when an election is fast approaching.

Indeed, Yoon lavished the attendees with support measures and promises of “various forms of financial assistance to help our startups grow to become global enterprises.” We have to ask whether this announcement was so pressing that it absolutely had to be made just before election day.

The same afternoon, Yoon held an “urban housing supply review meeting,” where he talked about “speeding up redevelopment and reconstruction to quickly provide the housing that the public wants.” This was a carbon copy of the ruling People Power Party’s election platform and a rehash of content from his roundtables on livelihood issues. His intentions in bringing it up again at this juncture seem pretty obvious.

The president isn’t the only one. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism recently raised a ruckus by asking various government offices to post a promotional video for Yoon entitled “The Path Chosen by the President.”

Although the videos were belatedly taken down after objections from official society and others, the ministry said Monday that its Public Communications Office — the main department in charge of this — had “played its part.”

This attitude of looking only to the president and not the public is precisely the reason it has been alienating that public — yet even after things blew up, its only focus was on self-justification. The Ministry of National Defense paused similar plans to assemble content from Yoon’s talks to provide “special moral education” to military personnel.

The president may be a PPP member, but ahead of that, he is a public servant who is forbidden by law to involve himself in elections. He also bears ultimate responsibility for managing things to ensure a fair election process. With the election just around the corner, he should be focusing on his duties and refraining from public statements and actions.

But Yoon is someone who has set quite a lot of inappropriate precedents. A case in point can be found with the 24 different “livelihood roundtables” that he held all around South Korea.

This election is a significant occasion in terms of evaluating the Yoon administration’s performance over the past two years. When it suddenly starts throwing out pledges now after doing who knows what to date, it’s an approach that can only backfire.

We can’t have any more of this sort of situation, where the president is the one leading the way with the kind of behavior that raises accusations of government election interference.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]