Yu Si-min calls President Lee 'an arrogant wielder of power' one year in

Author and broadcaster Yu Si-min said President Lee Jae Myung has shown "the face of an arrogant wielder of power" in his first year in office.

Yu appeared on "Journalist," a YouTube channel run by former reporter Jang In-su.

Asked to give an overall assessment of the Democratic Party's national convention, Yu said the party had succeeded in upholding the principle of member sovereignty. "Isn't the Democratic Party a party that embodies republican principles under the name of member sovereignty? This was a convention that managed to preserve that," he said.

He said Democratic Party leader Kim Min-seok had run as the president's proxy. "The president sending his own representative to control the party runs counter to the spirit of republicanism," Yu said. He described the outcome as party members agonizing before giving about 54 percent of the vote to the president's chosen candidate while keeping the minority faction alive by electing three supreme council members from the group known as Team Jung Chung-rae.

Yu said citizens who strongly support the Democratic Party but are not registered members actively answered phone calls to bring down Kim Yong. "They smashed one window of a car you hold dear," he said.

"President Lee is dismantling his own governing coalition," Yu said. "Things are heading toward a very unstable phase."

He said Lee had won 49 percent of the vote by uniting the entire progressive reform camp through a political coalition built on overcoming the insurrection. "That is his base," Yu said. "And he has been dismantling it himself."

He added that the convention had confirmed the Democratic Party had also lost half its members. "This is extremely damaging for the president," he said. "I don't understand why he is doing this to himself."

Yu said he had long argued that Lee would become a better person as president by learning from the role's demands. "But what I sense now is that the learning seems to have stopped," he said, adding that he did not know why.

Yu said no president had ever taken office under such favorable conditions. "The cooperative seats in the National Assembly exceed 180, and the Democratic Party's ruling-party seats alone exceed 160," he said. He noted that approval ratings had been very high and that the ruling party had been highly responsive to the president. "All he had to do was govern well," he said.

"He only needed to focus on the presidency. If he had done that, every problem — even his personal ones — would have been resolved. I don't understand why he came up with that strange term 'structural majority,'" Yu said. He also criticized Chief of Staff Kang Hoon-sik for reportedly invoking a "third way" at a lawmakers' workshop, calling it a serious breach of his proper role.

"Why would the ruling party with an overwhelming majority pursue something like a third way?" Yu said. "President Kim Dae-jung already did the third way." He called the idea "nonsensical" and questioned where Kang had heard such ideas before daring to lecture 160 lawmakers at a workshop.

Yu called Kang's remarks an embarrassment and said they showed contempt for popular sovereignty. "Since when does a chief of staff go and gather 160 lawmakers to lecture them with ideas that don't even hold up?" he said.