PM Kim Min-seok vows youth-led push on voting rights, touts 12 achievements

Prime Minister Kim Min-seok said Monday that the government would let young people take the lead in resolving issues surrounding citizens' voting rights, with the government playing a supporting role.

Speaking at a press briefing at the annex of the Government Seoul Complex, Kim said political parties had been relatively lacking in dialogue and communication with youth and university students. "In connection with the voting rights issue, I want to support a youth-led public deliberation process," he said.

Kim added that even after leaving the prime ministerial post, he would ask the Office for Government Policy Coordination — which oversees public deliberation — to give the matter special attention, and that he intended to follow up through the National Assembly. "I want to pursue a way of resolving the voting rights issue in which young people lead and the government supports from behind," he said.

Kim said the National Assembly would begin full-fledged discussions on a single-issue constitutional reform aimed at overhauling the National Election Commission, and that debates involving ruling and opposition parties as well as experts would continue. "I will work to produce an alternative that our society can accept, given that the majority of citizens feel a sense of urgency about the problem," he said.

On the approval ratings of the president and the ruling party, Kim said the government and the ruling party were one body sharing a common fate. He said the president's leadership had driven the administration's approval rating in the past and that election results had been broadly anticipated, but that the actual outcome fell short of projections. "That means we need to reflect more deeply," he said.

Kim said that up to now, the structure in which presidential leadership drove both the administration's approval rating and the party's had been in effect, but that both had been trending downward since the election. "Now that the first-year election is over, this is precisely the time for the ruling party and the government to achieve perfect alignment and cooperation, and for the party to work to boost approval ratings by backing the president's governance," he said.

Kim said that once he returned to the party, he felt an increasingly strong sense of responsibility to devote himself fully to restoring the party's approval rating, translating that into a recovery of the administration's rating, and further strengthening the momentum of governance.

Kim assessed his own tenure, saying he had "meticulously and without controversy handled every assigned task to perfection" over the past year, and that he had embodied "soft charisma" as the first-term prime minister of the Lee Jae Myung government.

On the purging of insurrection-related figures, Kim said he had actively exercised the authority granted to the prime minister under the Constitution and the Government Organization Act, including directly revoking lenient disciplinary decisions against those who had participated in the martial law declaration.

Specifically, when the Army Headquarters' judge advocate general — who had boarded a martial law bus bound for Yongsan to help staff the martial law command — received only a reprimand from the Ministry of National Defense, Kim canceled the defense minister's disciplinary decision. He said this marked the first time in constitutional history that a prime minister had validly exercised the power of revocation.

Kim listed 12 key achievements of his tenure as first-term prime minister under the Lee Jae Myung government: successfully hosting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, attracting a global AI hub, creating a breakthrough on social conflicts, pioneering practical prime ministerial diplomacy, purging insurrection-related figures, improving public communication on state affairs, driving locally led growth, leading youth-inclusive governance, reducing the number of suicide deaths, expanding the pan-government agenda, resolving pressing issues as a field- and livelihood-focused prime minister, and managing an emergency economic response to the war in the Middle East.

Kim departed Monday on a two-night, three-day trip to China, where he will attend the Summer Davos Forum through Wednesday.