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There’s been a massive political protest in the South Korean capital Seoul. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to demand President Park Geun-hye’s resignation. She is accused of allowing her friend Choi Soon-sil to access government documents without clearance.Ms. Choi is accused of trying to extort huge sums of money from South Korean companies and is under arrest on charges of fraud and abuse of power. These protesters explained why they want President Park to go.
Right now, it’s a politically difficult situation. And the people are having a difficult time. In order to quickly put an end to this situation, it is much better to cut off the tangled thread. And I came out here with that in mind. What I want is for the President to make a decision quickly and step down.
I came out here to call for the resignation of the Park administration which’s made living conditions worse, worse for workers, completely messed up the state governance and monopolized state affairs within the secret powerhouse. It feels much better to shout together with many other people.
The president has apologized for being what she called “neglectful” but denied any criminal wrongdoing. Our correspondent in Seoul Steve Evans spoke to us from the venue of the protest.
This is a big demonstration on anybody’s figures and the police say a quarter of a million. The best estimate is that it’s one of the biggest demonstrations there’s been since democracy in 1986. There’s no doubt it is a pretty broad based movement. And if you look at the opinion polls, her standing is right down rock bottom five percent, no more than five percent. And that’s lower than the president when the country was officially bankrupt. So there’s certainly a very strong movement here. And you can feel it on the streets. It’s not just about the president. It’s a whole amalgam of stuff, the scandals surrounding the president or people close to the president certainly, but also there are investigations of corruption in some of the conglomerates for example. There are attempts to make it easier to sack people. The economy is not growing as fast as people think it should do. It was even the Samsung smart phone debacle where some of them caught fire and the whole thing was withdrawn. So there’s a sense of things not going right, which is crystallized by this investigation swirling round President Park.
Steve Evans in Seoul.
Hundreds of residents of Venice staged a protest on Saturday.
