North Korea leader Kim Jong Un scores surprising favorability among South Koreans after summit

The well-choreographed production of last week’s promising summit between North and South Korea appears to have given a boost to public approval ratings for the countries’ two leaders among South Koreans.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s approval ratings surged to 83 percent this week, a 10-point boost from the week before, according to a poll conducted by Gallup Korea. This is the highest first-year-in-office ratings among all previous South Korean presidents.

Asked whether counterpart North Korea leader Kim Jong Un is trustworthy, a surprising 78 percent of South Koreans responded positively to an MBC TV poll by one of South Korea’s main terrestrial channels. Of that figure, 17 percent said Kim was “very trustworthy” while 60 percent answered “generally trustworthy.”

“He was so different from what I had thought,” said Kim So-yeon, a Seoul housewife who told ABC News she was shocked when Kim admitted his country lagged behind South Korea’s infrastructure and called for the unity of Koreans. “He seemed humble and the speech was actually touching. He just seemed normal: smiling and joking.”

KCNA via KNS/AFP/Getty Images

From Moon’s early-morning departure from the presidential Bluehouse office to Kim’s emotional departure back to the North with his wife late in the evening, most of the summit events last Friday were broadcast live to the world.

The almost theatrical production of the day’s events between Kim and Moon, at times seen with their aides and later in the evening with their wives, were met with mostly compliments in the past week from receptive supporters, but taken with a grain of salt from others still suspicious of Kim’s motives.

“I never thought I would live to this day to see Kim and Moon act like best friends,” Sohn Chang-keun, a private chauffeur who identified his political preference as conservative, told ABC News. “It’s surreal and sometimes I ask myself, am I being fooled by the show, it was all too perfect.”

But overall, political media experts say the historical summit (where the two sides agreed to denuclearize the peninsula and later this year formally end the war between them) was well-planned, given the short month-and-a-half preparation period, and impressively carried out, just enough to draw President Donald Trump’s attention to consider the same Panmunjom location at the border as a potential venue for his planned meeting with Kim.

The big question now for Moon’s team that organized the summit preparation is whether Panmunjom will be chosen for the U.S.-North Korea summit and what to offer that could satisfy Trump’s TV-driven appetite in case the U.S. State Department asks for assistance.

The Dream Team

President Moon’s team of media experts has a long history of success in connecting with the masses. Most of the members are from his presidential campaign joining the administration to work at the Bluehouse sections in press relations, protocols and social media. As a result, unlike previous administrations, Moon’s team consists of mostly experts with private sector experience rather than career bureaucrats.

The social media team, dubbed “new media” section, for example, consists of a dozen tech-savvy experts in their 20s to 50s of various backgrounds. “I come from the fashion magazine industry,” Kim Seon, assistant secretary to the president for new media, told ABC News. “We’ve got colleagues who were bloggers, writers and ex-workers at portal sites.”

Kim anchors Chongwadae, or Bluehouse, live broadcasts on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube accounts every morning delivering news and discussions from within the president’s office.”Content creation is on top of our list,” she added. “We make extra effort to try to connect with the people.”

The senior official praised by domestic media for the meticulous planning of last Friday’s summit details is Tak Hyun-min at the presidential protocol office.

A former event planner and producer, Tak, 45, is known to have bucked the trend throughout Moon’s presidency by inviting a rock band to a citizen town hall meeting with the president inside the Bluehouse to commemorate the 100th day of his inauguration.

Chongwadae

He also masterminded a casual beer meeting last year at the Bluehouse guest house lawn with business leaders that, in the past administrations, would have taken place in a formal authoritative banquet setting. Tak received positive reviews for organizing the flashy evening outdoor music concert in coordination with a light-show projecting onto the side of the Peace House on the summit evening.

A string of emotional pictures of Moon and Kim earlier that day were projected on the building topped with background music song wishing for peace as the two first ladies hugged in emotion bidding farewell.

“We always think of how do we create that code of impression, how to move people,” Yoon Jae-kwan, a colleague of Tak’s at the protocol office, told ABC News.

Yoon came up with the idea of the private bridge walk between Moon and Kim who sat on a bench for 45 minutes. The scene was broadcast live, shot from afar without audio, leading many to guess what the two leaders were discussing in private. Asked this week by reporters about the topic, Moon dodged the question saying, “it was really pleasant to see the landscape with the sounds of birds.”

Korea Summit Press Pool/Reuters

Korean Summit Press/EPA via Rex/Shutterstock

Korea Summit Press Pool via AP

Organizational planning by the media relations team to host over 3,000 journalists was also well-received. Camped at a huge exhibition hall only 18 miles south of the border, the media-filing center was well-equipped with 5G internet access, free interview rooms, sound booths and prompt briefings throughout the day.

“This liberal progressive administration is strong in public relations, and utilizing media and culture,” political communications professor Hahn Kyu-sup of Seoul National University said. “If you consider President Trump’s style, I originally thought he would be bold enough to either go to Pyongyang or invite Kim Jong Un to Washington. But he [Trump] probably saw how well the summit was played and thought that Panmunjom would be a realistic choice. It’s the symbol of truce; very good PR.”