At the apogee of his political career, the new Nobel Peace laureate, Kim Dae Jung, faces such declining popularity at home as to threaten his reform efforts for the last two years of his term as president of South Korea. The twin causes of South Koreans' discontent are the renewed relapse of the economy following the financial crisis that almost bankrupted the country three years ago and, paradoxically, Mr. Kim's success in beginning a reconciliation with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Sunday. The problem goes beyond party politics to bureaucracy, said Mr. Han, a professor at Korea University and a frequent commentator with a moderate conservative view.
Some appointees have no intention of carrying out restructuring.
Even Mr. Kim's allies see problems. The declining economy is affecting the middle and lower class. The recurring sense of economic crisis has prompted many conservative South Koreans to question Mr. Kim's reaching out to the North, one of the world's poorest countries. What rankles Mr. Wi and others who see Mr. Kim as having steered the country through the economic turmoil of 1998 is that many conservatives, who form the majority of the electorate, do not think the president should have left South Korea for the Nobel ceremony. When the Kyunghyang Shinmun, a newspaper with a generally moderate editorial position, conducted an Internet poll about the trip, it found 54 per cent of the 17,346 respondents opposed the journey and 45 per cent favoured it.