Seoul: President Lee Jae Myung’s approval rating has edged down to 59 percent, a survey showed Thursday. In a National Barometer Survey (NBS) conducted from Monday to Wednesday, the positive assessment of Lee’s performance slipped 3 percentage points from the previous poll conducted two weeks earlier, while the negative assessment added 3 percentage points to 31 percent.
According to Yonhap News Agency, in terms of Lee’s policy performance, 63 percent said Lee did “better than expected” in his first 100 days in office, while 31 percent said he failed to meet expectations. In the same survey, 51 percent gave a positive assessment of the government’s handling of a massive raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) against South Korean workers in the state of Georgia, while 35 percent disapproved of it.
The pollster did not provide a reason for the decline in Lee’s approval rating, but major issues, such as the ICE raid, may have contributed to the dip. Meanwhile, the approval rating for the ruling Democratic Party slipped 2 percentage points to 41 percent.
Support for the main opposition People Power Party rose 2 percentage points to 22 percent, while the figure for the minor Rebuilding Korea Party, led by former Justice Minister Cho Kuk, fell 3 percentage points to 2 percent, following a sexual misconduct scandal. The survey was conducted by pollsters Embrain Public, Kstat Research, Korea Research and Hankook Research on 1,002 people aged 18 and older.
The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.