Moon Jae-in’s presidency began amid unprecedented mass protests and the lawful removal of his predecessor. As Moon’s term comes to a close, his presidency will be judged on its response to COVID-19, his absence of corruption, and a major shift in the ideological centre of South Korean politics.

As we approach the 2022 South Korean presidential election, we can start evaluating the Moon Jae-in presidency in a historical context. Over Moon’s five years in office, what comes to the forefront, understandably, is his government’s successes and failures in response to the pandemic.

Otherwise, unless something very unexpected takes place or is later revealed — which admittedly has happened with prior administrations — we should begin by noting its absence of corruption. Moon’s term arose under the unprecedented circumstances of an impeachment and removal, sparked by enormous street demonstrations, of a South Korean chief executive, Park Geun-hye, which resulted in a snap election in May 2017.

To not be engulfed by or mired in corruption should be a low bar to clear. But as we know from the troubled history of the South Korean presidency, leaving with such a clean record has proven difficult. Indeed, until very recently, the preceding two presidents were sitting in jail — one still is. Not unrelated to this issue, and equally significant in light of long-term historical patterns, is the other major accomplishment of the Moon years: the shifting of the ideological centre in South Korean politics that Moon Jae-in has cultivated, guided, and driven.

Urgent Matters

Perhaps a good place to review Moon’s performance in this and other matters is with the self-assessment that he offered on 25 October 2021 in his last major address to the National Assembly, the traditional “Administration Speech” accompanying the unveiling of his government’s annual budget proposal. He declared that he has been a “crisis” president—he even alluded to Churchill and, through the notion of pushing a “Korean-styled New Deal,” compared himself to Franklin Roosevelt. Moon pointed out that his administration began with a North Korean nuclear provocation, then suffered the Japanese government’s diplomatic and economic sanctions, and then of course had to respond to COVID-19. Throughout, Moon argued, his government used these emergencies as opportunities for introducing dramatic reforms.

The North Korean crisis, however, was simply the latest in a long string of similar incidents, though admittedly Moon felt sufficiently compelled to arrange two individual summits with his Northern counterpart. The Japanese matter was also historically predetermined to remain an ongoing challenge, given their painful past of colonisation. In other words, dealing assertively with both cases, especially the latter, represented low-hanging fruit, relatively speaking.

This stood in stark contrast to the pandemic, which will undoubtedly become another basis for historical judgement, just as it has been throughout the world. And as almost everywhere else, at least in functioning democracies, the Moon government will be judged not just by its own achievements, but by the COVID-19 response from the country as a whole.

That is why it is also difficult, at this moment, to throw much or most of the credit to Moon for what appears as a relative success story in the pandemic, at least so far. His personal style and unshakable faith in his administration’s leadership clearly contributed. Also significant were a sturdy public health system and a generally competent expert-driven state, as well as the compliance of habitual behaviours, developed over decades if not centuries, from the public’s faith in the bureaucratic machinery in such matters, even as other some democracies were torn apart by ignorance and demagoguery.

The elaboration of the Korean-styled New Deal in his speech, however, mostly presented the predictable emphases by a left-oriented government on various social programs, garnished with visions for decarbonising and further digitising the economy. All of this was folded into the trendy umbrella branding, appropriated from popular culture, of anything seen as point of national strength as “K-this” or “K-that” — even “K-shipbuilding.”

Momentous Developments and Structural Challenges

Such an inventory, while demonstrating his progressive bona-fides, called into question Moon’s claims of a crisis presidency as much as it reinforced them. But it also reflected the two developments that the Moon presidency will likely be remembered most for, in addition to the country’s success and failures in the pandemic.

The first matter emerged, interestingly, in the process of selecting Moon’s successor in the election campaign season that began in late 2021, which demonstrated that, over the Moon years, the erstwhile ideological core of the progressive left came to occupy much of the centre of national politics. The candidate who emerged as the runaway victorious candidate from Moon’s Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, for example, touted a basic income plan and was further to the left than Moon by most measures.

Most strikingly, however, was the shift seen in the main conservative party, the so-called People Power Party (PPP) by its latest renaming. Remarkably, three of the four main contenders in its primary campaign could be considered centrists, while the fourth, Hong Jun-pyo, the previous nominee of the party, was cowed intellectually by the others in the debates and forced to adopt their positions. The winning candidate, former chief prosecutor Yun Seog-yeol, who frankly admitted he could just as easily have joined the Democrats had they been the opposition party, embraced the state’s overriding role in social welfare, the moral imperatives of equity and economic fairness, and most strikingly, key tenets of the progressive view of recent Korean history.

It can be debated whether this shift had more to do with the stunned reckoning with the preceding Park presidency, the pandemic, or the ideological evolution of the populace as a whole, but undoubtedly the Moon years curated this transition. Such a reality also overshadows smaller controversies and scandals that his political opponents seized upon, most famously the turmoil surrounding Cho Guk, an official in Moon’s Blue House, then briefly his justice minister. The former law professor, before he came into government service, appears to have arranged fraudulent advantages for his children in the hyper-competitive educational arena. Although it was found that Cho’s wife was the main culprit, for which she has been tried and jailed, in the public’s view Cho, a stalwart progressive activist intellectual, represented the hypocrisy and failures of the Moon presidency’s purported commitment to societal fairness. However, while this might have been an error in oversight on Moon’s part, one cannot argue that it was an instance of presidential corruption.

In any case the Cho controversy further inflamed popular anger over ingrained inequalities, exacerbated by the broader and inexorable structural changes that South Korea, like so many other places, has undergone in line with automation and digitisation in the economy. Meanwhile, the cratering birth rate, continuing high suicide rate, and the rapid greying of the population have blared unmistakably alarming signals about the overall health and welfare of the populace. As Moon himself admitted, despite accelerated spending that resulted in heavy government debt, his government did not make much headway in fixing these problems of structural inequality and economic polarisation which directly accounted for the two most notoriously pressing problems according to just about everyone in South Korea — skyrocketing housing prices and the under- and unemployment of younger Koreans. The latter phenomenon even morphed into an unseemly, social media-driven incitement of young adult males, whose wailing claims of gender victimisation ballooned into an unavoidable factor in the 2022 presidential election.

Such ongoing perceptions of crisis in socio-economic opportunity and life quality threaten to undermine the Moon presidency’s achievements, including the significant relief from an absence of a major corruption scandal, and leave his historical standing vulnerable, both now and in the future.

Kyung Moon Hwang is Korea Foundation Professor in the School of Culture, History, and Language at the ANU. His most recent book is A History of Korea–An Episodic Narrative (Third Edition, Bloomsbury, 2022).

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.