South Korea’s ruling Grand National Party (GNP) chief quit yesterday to take responsibility for the poor showing in local elections, trying to contain the impact on President Lee Myung-bak’s pro-business reforms.
Lee said he would push through with his agenda, including cleaning up bureaucracy and cutting taxes, which analysts said was unlikely to be derailed by the unexpected strong performance by the opposition Democratic Party.
“The government needs to go back to the work of economic recovery and sustained growth,” Lee told a meeting yesterday.
The Democratic Party won seven of 16 major races for the country’s largest cities and the provinces in an upset that surprised GNP and analysts who had been expecting a large win for the conservative ruling party.
Lee’s uncompromising stand against North Korea after blaming it for sinking one of its navy ships had seen him and the GNP bounce back in opinion polls from a backlash after a decision to scrap a plan to shift a large part of the government from Seoul and rows over US beef imports and a river project.
The GNP candidate narrowly defeated a Democrat in the race for Seoul mayor but the incumbent conservative lost in the city of Incheon.
The current GNP governor of the Gyeonggi Province surrounding Seoul that is home to more than 11 million kept his office but the party was shut out in the rest of the country except in its traditional stronghold of the southeast in what analysts saw as sign of voter disillusionment with some of Lee’s policies.
“We humbly accept the voice of the Korean people of rebuke,” GNP chief Chung Mong-joon told a leadership meeting. “I want to take this chance to express my wish to resign.”
Chung has been considered a leading candidate to succeed Lee and was expected to run again as party chief this month.
Voting for nearly 4,000 offices around the country had been overshadowed by the March sinking of the South Korean naval corvette Cheonan, fuelling shrill rhetoric from North and South Korea, including threats of war.
At the UN, South Korea’s vice foreign minister said Seoul was ready to ask the Security Council to take up the incident for censure and was looking for the best time to do it.
US President Barack Obama said the North would be held accountable for the attack, including at the Security Council.
South Korea and the US are to hold a naval military exercise next week, about a month ahead of schedule, to “demonstrate the strong willingness by both Seoul and Washington to deter North Korea” from further provocations, the JoongAng Daily said yesterday, quoting military officials.
North Korea denies responsibility for the ship attack and has accused Seoul of staging the incident to help Lee in the local elections.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS