POLITICS / UNREST IN SOUTH KOREA : Roh’s Popularity Plummets as the Economy Slides

On the walls are handwritten posters like those on South Korea’s college campuses. “President Roh Tae Woo! Roll up your sleeves and do something!” declared one of them.

But this was a stockbroker’s office in the fashionable Myongdong section of downtown Seoul. And the angry protesters were not students or workers, but a band of individual investors.

Their attacks on brokerages--in which they have thrown chairs, smashed windows and torn up trading slips--have turned usually staid Myongdong offices into harassed fortresses since April. Some brokerages now lock their doors and open them only to recognized customers.

Stock investors are only the latest to join a seemingly ever-broadening circle of South Koreans complaining about Roh and his handling of both politics and the economy: farmers angered by an opening of markets to imports; workers demanding higher wages; businessmen unhappy about the government’s restricting loans while at the same time criticizing corporations for not investing enough in production; homemakers upset by soaring rents and consumer prices, and even bureaucrats--who routinely talk of their problems with “the weak government.”

In addition, dissidents and radical students are demanding Roh’s ouster.

“If Roh had not been elected by popular vote, he wouldn’t be in office today,” Prof. Park Young Ki of Sogang University’s Institute for Labor and Management declared.

“Nothing is working,” groused a former official now working with a research institute.

Meanwhile, foreign diplomats offer only praise for the beleaguered former general, who took over in 1988 after promising to end authoritarian rule and democratize South Korea.

“Koreans are not quite used to the inconveniences of democracy,” said one Western diplomat, who asked not to be identified. “Many still remember how things were when the students couldn’t get off campus, the newspapers were censored and labor suppressed.”

The diplomat argued that Roh “is an effective leader . . . but there is a great impatience here.”

Indeed, the scenes in the Myongdong brokers’ offices seem to mirror that statement.

“I’ve lost 50 million won” (about $71,000) as the Seoul stock market plunged from a high of more than 1,000 points in April, 1989, to 688 at one point early this month, said one middle-aged man who refused to identify himself.

“The finance minister should be fired!” another chimed in.

Park Young Hwan, a broker, said his office had been invaded 15 days in a row in April by individual investors, who constitute 70% of all stockholders, demanding that trading be halted.

Criticism of Roh has focused on a sudden decline in the volume of exports and a slowdown in economic growth--although, as James W. Booth, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce here, put it, “almost any other nation in the world would be rejoicing at (the) 7% growth” that is expected this year.

For South Koreans the trouble is that between 1986 and 1988, annual growth was about 12%.

Although labor and currency problems that have plagued South Korea for the last three years appear to be easing, potentially more serious troubles--political instability and plummeting stock prices--are emerging.

An amalgamation of Roh’s ruling--but minority--party in the National Assembly with parties run by two of his former foes gave the president, in one stroke, more than two-thirds of the unicameral legislature’s seats. But a power struggle within the new party has transformed what initially appeared to be a political masterstroke into a debacle.

One poll that the ruling party conducted in April put its public support at 10%.

“There is a strong sense of betrayal among the voters,” said Prof. Donald N. Clark, a visiting professor at Yonsei University. “It is not the political system they established.”

Despite large demonstrations this month in Seoul and Kwangju, Roh’s troubles appear unlikely to threaten his power. But the Establishment is wondering what might happen when voters get their next chance. Roh’s term ends in 1993.

SOUTH KOREAN INFLATION 1980: 28.7% 1981: 21.3% 1982: 7.3% 1983: 3.4% 1984: 2.3% 1985: 2.5% 1986: 2.8% 1987: 3.0% 1988: 7.1% 1989: 5.7% 1990: 14.0% (projected) Source: International Monetary Fund