Approval ratings for both ruling party, Moon rebound: poll

Politics 12:15 May 21, 2021

SEOUL, May 21 (Yonhap) -- Both the ruling Democratic Party (DP) and President Moon Jae-in saw their approval ratings rebound this week, an opinion poll showed Friday.

According to the poll by Gallup Korea, conducted from Tuesday-Thursday on 1,001 people age 18 or over, the approval rating for the DP stood at 32 percent, up 4 percentage points from a week earlier.

The main opposition People Power Party, meanwhile, saw its approval rating edge down by 1 percentage point to 26 percent, while 30 percent of the total respondents said they do not support any political party.

The approval ratings for the Justice Party, a progressive minor party, and the People Party, a conservative minor party, were 5 percent and 4 percent, respectively.

In the same survey, the approval rating for Moon came to 34 percent, up 2 percentage points from a week earlier, while the disapproval rating fell by 3 percentage points to 58 percent.

Thirty-two percent of those who positively assessed the Moon administration cited the government's COVID-19 response as the reason for their assessments, followed by the government's "hard work" at 10 percent.

As reasons for negative assessments, 30 percent pointed to the government's real estate policy, followed by its lack of ability to tackle economic woes (10 percent) and poor handling of the coronavirus (9 percent), among others.

The survey has a 95 percent confidence level with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.