SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korean President Park Geun-hye has offered to step down in April, leaders of her party said Tuesday after meeting with her. But the offer was unlikely to prevent an impeachment vote on Friday over a corruption scandal that has turned the vast majority of the public against her.
Park appeared to accept that a vote on impeachment is inevitable and said that she is bracing for it, Chung Jin-suk, the floor leader of Park's governing party, Saenuri, said in a statement Tuesday after meeting with the president for 55 minutes.
Chung said he told Park the party could not prevent the impeachment vote and that she nodded in response.
Park said last week that she was willing to resign before the end of her term but that she would leave it to the National Assembly to decide the terms, including the date of her departure. Critics saw that offer as an attempt to divide her opponents and stall the push for impeachment.
Members of Saenuri loyal to Park suggested that she resign in April, and it seemed possible that some lawmakers leaning toward impeachment would accept that as a compromise. But a huge rally against the president on Saturday, the latest in a series of enormous weekly demonstrations, appears to have bolstered pro-impeachment sentiment in the National Assembly.
It is uncertain what the outcome of an impeachment vote would be. But news outlets reported Tuesday that the pro-impeachment lawmakers were believed to have the 200 votes necessary to pass the bill in the 300-seat body.
"I have always thought I would accept" the suggestion to resign in April, Chung quoted Park as saying. Leaving office in April would cut Park's term short by 10 months.
According to Chung, Park said that if she were impeached, she would stay "calm and composed" during the next step in the process: waiting for the Constitutional Court to rule on whether her impeachment was warranted.
The court has up to six months to decide. During that period, Park's presidential powers would be suspended, and Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn would step in as acting president. If the court were to rule against her impeachment, she would immediately return to office. If not, South Korea would hold an election in 60 days to select her successor.
Opposition lawmakers criticized Park on Tuesday for not resigning immediately. "She tries to hang on to the very last," said Youn Kwan-suk, a spokesman for the main opposition Democratic Party. "We will fulfill the people's will by impeaching her."
Some political analysts say an immediate departure by Park would give the opposition a better chance of winning the presidency, because the 60 days within which an election must be held would not give Saenuri much time to recover from the disgrace.
The government has been paralyzed for weeks over a corruption and influence-peddling scandal involving a longtime friend and confidante of Park, Choi Soon-sil. Choi has been indicted on a charge of extorting large sums from South Korean companies. Prosecutors have said that Park helped her and have identified her as a criminal suspect, a first for a president, though she cannot be indicted while in office.
Park would be the first South Korean president to face impeachment since 2004, when the National Assembly impeached Roh Moo-hyun, the president at the time, for violating election law. Two months later, the Constitutional Court ruled that Roh's offenses were too minor to justify impeachment and restored him to office.
But Park faces much more serious accusations. In an impeachment motion submitted to the National Assembly over the weekend, opposition parties accused Park of conspiring with Choi to force large South Korean businesses, including Hyundai and Samsung, to donate tens of millions of dollars to two foundations Choi controlled. They also accuse her of illegally sharing confidential government documents with Choi, who had no official post. Prosecutors have also accused Park of those offenses.
A Section on 12/07/2016