Seoul: President Lee Jae Myung’s approval rating has edged down to 56 percent, a survey showed Thursday. In a National Barometer Survey (NBS) conducted from Monday to Wednesday, the positive assessment of Lee’s performance slipped 1 percentage point from the previous poll conducted two weeks earlier, while the negative assessment rose by 1 percentage point to 35 percent.

According to Yonhap News Agency, Lee’s approval rating has declined after hitting 62 percent in NBS polls in the first week of September. The approval rating for the ruling Democratic Party (DP) also dropped 2 percentage points to 39 percent, falling below the 40 percent mark for the first time since Lee took office in June. Meanwhile, support for the main opposition People Power Party rose 1 percentage point to 23 percent.

In the same survey, 48 percent of the respondents gave a positive assessment of Lee’s appearance on a TV cooking show, which drew criticism for being inappropriate amid a nationwide outage of online government services caused by a major fire at a state data center last month. Thirty-five percent gave a negative assessment of his TV appearance, while 18 percent said they were undecided.

The survey was conducted by pollsters Embrain Public, Kstat Research, Korea Research, and Hankook Research on 1,000 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.