Quid game: challenges for South Korea’s president

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0:59The Economist

1:06Rosie Blau:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor.

1:15Rosie Blau:Today on the show, India's Cockroach Party and remembering Iranian author and artist Majan Satrapi.

1:30Rosie Blau:First up, though.

1:36Hello. Hi. Nice to meet you, Chris Lockwood. Nice to meet you. Noah Snyder.

1:43Where will the president be sitting just so I can place the microphone in the best place? My colleague Chris Lockwood and I recently paid a visit to an opulent, blue-tiled complex in central Seoul known as the Blue House.

1:58Rosie Blau:Noah Snyder is our East Asia Bureau Chief. It's the home of South Korea's political leaders, and we were there to interview Lee Jae-myung, South Korea's current president. He's been in power for just over a year now, and he took over following his predecessor's turbulent rule, which ended in a declaration of martial law and subsequent impeachment. We walked through well-manicured grounds and into a central building, up a broad staircase and past a textile showing the entirety of the Korean peninsula in what seemed like full bloom and into a grand meeting room. There, President Yi really projected a kind of calm and confidence.

2:44He was clearly trying to signal that South Korea is back on track and that he is guiding a country in the right direction, that the country can move past this abnormal period of chaos and forward towards a brighter future and perhaps, as he puts it, even one where South Korea can be a nation that leads the world. Now, that may be aspirational, but it suggests, again, the confidence that he's operating with at this point in his presidency.

3:15Rosie Blau:Noah, I'm keen to hear more about what he said. But first of all, tell me a bit more of what he's actually like. President Yee comes from a non-traditional political background, you might say. He grew up an impoverished family. He was essentially a laborer as a child, didn't receive formal secondary schooling. He became a labor lawyer, self-trained initially, and really rose from rather remarkable circumstances to become his country's president. But he's very much a natural politician. He has a charming affect, which he's put to work on world leaders from Donald Trump to Xi Jinping, and that he certainly put on display with us as well.

3:55And he knows how to communicate his message. And again, I think the message he was sending to us and to our readers and listeners out there was that South Korea is back on track.

4:08Rosie Blau:He's been there a year. Would you say that's right, is South Korea back on track? I think he does have many reasons to feel confident. For one thing, his approval ratings remain pretty high for a South Korean president at this stage in his term, around 60%. It reflects, I think, a feeling amongst many South Koreans that he has restored stability, that he has restored a kind of normalcy to South Korea's political life after a period of great turbulence. He's also managed to steer South Korea's relations with its neighbors and sometimes very complicated relationships with America, with China and Japan pretty deftly.

4:46And so I think there is a case that he has righted the ship of state, that he has South Korea back on track. But at the same time, the clearly big challenge is looming and he has another four years left in his term and the rest of his term may prove to be more challenging even than this critical first year.

5:03Rosie Blau:So what's he actually done so far? Well, he's made very clear that artificial intelligence and renewable energy are the country's industrial priorities, and that his government is going to be investing big in those industries and to incentivize South Korean companies to maintain their competitiveness. And all of this is happening on the backs of a blistering rally in South Korea's stock market, thanks to the AI investment cycle globally. South Korean chip makers make the memory chips that are an essential part of the underlying infrastructure for AI and data centers. And that has pushed the key South Korean stock index to record highs.

5:42It's nearly tripled in the past year since President Yi has been in office. And in fact, he came into office promising to raise it from 3 ,000 to just 5 ,000 during the course of his whole five-year term. But as luck would have it, the index now sits above 8 ,000.

5:59Rosie Blau:And you've already referred to the challenges he's facing. What are those challenges, particularly at home? Well, I think one of the challenges is the flip side of this market boom. If this AI investment cycle peters out or dips or pauses, I think there is a risk that his ratings and his own standing will take a hit along with that. But perhaps more importantly, in the long run, this newfound wealth is also raising new questions about equality and how to make sure that this growth is both sustainable and shared throughout society.

6:36President Yi, in our interview, he said that it's time to start thinking about new alternatives, about things like a basic income, changes to the tax system, to distribute the new revenue coming into government coffers from companies that are enjoying a windfall from the AI boom.

6:56Rosie Blau:South Korea always has a delicate balancing act between China, its neighbor, and the US. And you said that he has already turned on the charm with Trump and with Xi Jinping. How's he doing in terms of foreign policy? He came into office promising a pragmatic foreign policy. In fact, the last time I interviewed him when he was still opposition leader and preparing for a run for president, he laid out exactly this case for a pragmatic principle. And I think by and large, he's lived up to it. He's managed to stabilize the relationship with China without seeming too obsequious. He's managed to forge a kind of unlikely bond with Japan's right-wing prime minister, Takahichi Sanaya, born of a shared understanding of their complicated strategic position between America and China.

7:47And finally, he has thus far kept Donald Trump happy, while also achieving some long-held South Korean goals in terms of their own security.

8:04He's managed to sort of placate Trump with promises of more defense spending and greater investment into America. But he also got something in return. And two really big items were Trump's blessing for South Korea to build nuclear-powered submarines of its own and also to develop the capacity to enrich and reprocess nuclear fuel, which would in theory facilitate the operation of those submarines and also South Korea's civil nuclear reactors. The unspoken part is that it also gives Korea greater flexibility in the future in terms of its own nuclear options.

8:43Rosie Blau:And North Korea? This is another one of those challenges looming over the rest of his term. President Yi has tried outreach but gotten little in return from the North Korean regime, which really has adopted an even more hostile than usual posture towards its other neighbors and made very clear that it wants to talk only with America and only if denuclearization is taken off the table.

9:17As President Yi mentioned, the war in Iran will only make it less likely for North Korea to consider giving up its arsenal. So there's a big question looming. How do you manage that problem? Especially again, as America is less predictable or less reliable.

9:34Rosie Blau:Noah, when Yi was elected last year, there were several trials hanging over his head. What happens to those now? You're right, Rosie. President Yi was in some legal hot water heading into the campaign for a series of cases connected to his time as a mayor and as a governor and cases that he says are politically motivated prosecutions. Those cases have been put on hold while he is in office, but there is the prospect that they reemerge when he leaves office. And this is a disturbing pattern for South Korean presidents. Since the country's democratization in the late 1980s, over half of the presidents who've led South Korea have ended up being impeached or jailed after leaving office or both.

10:27There is a cycle of retribution that President Yee acknowledged in our interview and said that he wants to break. Some in South Korea even talk about this as the curse of the Blue House. And I do think that part of President Yi's legacy will depend on whether he can overcome that vicious cycle and perhaps even break the curse of the Blue House.

10:50Rosie Blau:Noah, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you.

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12:15Last Saturday morning, Abhijit Dipka arrived in Delhi straight off the plane from Boston and staged a protest in the 40-degree heat.

12:25Rosie Blau:Tom Sass is our South Asia Bureau Chief. I got down there around 11am and found lots of young people chanting and banging drums.

12:38Until recently, Dipka was a 30-year-old Indian communications consultant living in Boston in America, who was fond of posting memes on the internet. Now he's accidentally found himself at the helm of a movement. His cockroach People's Party began as a joke in response to a nasty comment made by the Chief Justice of India's Supreme Court, comparing India's many jobless young people to cockroaches. But the joke quickly spiraled. Tell me what you're wearing on your head. This is actually the symbol of a cockroach jantar party. It's a people party of cockroach. The party has attracted millions of followers online.

13:14Rosie Blau:So Tom, tell me a bit more about this gathering. What was it all about? So I asked Anurag, a guy in his 30s who was wearing a cockroach mask, to explain exactly this to me. Tell me what they're saying, their slogan. They are saying they're asking our education minister resignation and also the system which is involved in this issue. Lots of people I met at the protest were angry about two specific education scandals. One involving a leaked medical entrance exam paper, the other involving the credibility of a whole exam board. So that's why they were calling for the education minister to resign.

13:55But the Cockroach Party is trying to make a bigger argument, really, that these two scandals reflect a broken system that is failing young Indians.

14:05Rosie Blau:So this is essentially a popular street movement. How unusual is that in India? Well, Rosie, the street really matters in Indian politics. Many of the country's political heroes have really forged their reputations there by amassing giant crowds with the drums and the slogans and the placards. Of course, you think of Mahatma Gandhi, also B.R. Ambedkar, who secured the rights for Dalits by organizing these giant street rallies, and also Narendra Modi. He cut his teeth as a student organizer, and protests played a big role in him coming to power nationally in 2014. The previous Congress government was dogged by corruption scandals and a huge street movement emerged with hunger strikes and so on.

14:58And actually, Modi's most difficult moment as Prime Minister was a giant protest in 2020-21.

15:09hundreds of thousands of farmers blockaded national highways in India and forced him to drop a set of new farm laws so all that is to say that these kind of protests absolutely have been a vehicle for change before in India including under this government but this one is very much

15:29Rosie Blau:in its infancy and what is the change that they're really pushing for as you say it's not just the education scandals that sparked this particular moment. Well, you're right. I mean, Indians and young Indians in particular have a lot to be angry about. It's not just education scandals. There's a real lack of jobs. Lots of them are graduating and finding it hard to meet the higher aspirations that they have. Not only exempt, even against the system. Nureen, a 25-year-old from Jaipur, like many others that I met at this protest, had travelled a few hundred kilometres to get there. So we just want to change the system, not only a single person.

16:11Everyone is asking the resignation of the education minister. But I just want, my demand is that we have to change the system. And others that I spoke to explained that they'd been afraid to criticise the government and this was one of the first times they'd seen the youth really fight back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there comes a time when you think that, OK, now I have to speak up, I have to live in this country. If my next generation, if the generation next to them have to live in this country,

16:39Rosie Blau:then I really cannot stay politically inactive anymore. I met a young woman called Ezebue. She was holding a placard saying, freedom from fear, but she only wanted to give me her first name. A lot of those expressions of angst seems to be things that resonate around the world from youth movements. And we have had particular ones in Asia, in Nepal, in Sri Lanka, in Bangladesh that have actually toppled governments. Where does this fit into that? I mean, it's true that you hear some of the same kind of messages at those protests, but I would be quite cautious about drawing too many parallels there.

17:17So in those countries that you mentioned, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, you really had a whole swathe of young people turning against really quite corrupt dictatorial regimes. That's not the situation in India. So the BJP, which is ruling nationally, Mr Modi's party, is still by far the most popular party in India, including among younger voters. But there are real frustrations among the youth with how the system is working.