Chairman of the Supreme Council of Menghe

The Chairman of the Supreme Council of Menghe (Menghean: 대멩 최고 의회 의장 / 大孟最高議會議長, Dae Meng Choego Yihoe Yijang) was the highest political office in the Socialist Republic of Menghe between 1988 and 2022. The holder of the position carried out his duties through leadership of the Supreme Council, the country's highest governing body, consisting of all ministry heads, three deputy chairmen, and the Chairman's chief of staff. As this amounted to direct control of the executive branch, the Chairman served as Menghe's head of state.

In 2022, a batch of amendments to the Constitution of Menghe abolished the position of Chairman of the Supreme Council, replacing it with the position of Prime Minister.

Origin and history

The Supreme Council of Menghe was the successor to the Interim Council for National Restoration, a military junta which ruled the country in the months following the coup that brought Choe Sŭng-min to power. Similarly, the chairmanship served as a continuation of Choe's role as Chairman of the Interim Council, and was deliberately designed around it in the 1990 constitution.

Eligibility

In order to be eligible for the position of Chairman of the Supreme Council, an individual must be a natural-born citizen at least 45 years old, who spent at least 25 years living on Menghean soil, and who has prior experience in a government post at the Ministry Head level or higher. This includes membership on the Interim Council for National Restoration.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not formally required that candidates under consideration for the post of Chairman be members of the Menghean Socialist Party, and Party organs do not directly review candidates at any stage of the process.

Selection procedure

The Chairman of the Supreme Council is selected every five years by the members of the National Assembly, and voted into office in an indirect election. There is no limit to the number of consecutive terms a Chairman may serve, and no mandatory retirement age. Choe Sŭng-min appointed himself to the position upon its creation, and was only formally elected in July 1989, after the first round of National Assembly elections was complete.

Selection of candidates follows an indirect procedure designed to maximize the incumbent's control over the process. At the beginning of each five-year session, the newly elected Speaker of the National Assembly holds a vote on whether the incumbent Chairman should be withdrawn and a replacement Chairman selected. If the incumbent Chairman receives an absolute majority of 140 votes, he remains in power for another five years, and can only be removed by a two-thirds impeachment vote.

If the incumbent Chairman receives fewer than 138 votes, the incumbent Chairman steps down and the Speaker forms an eleven-member Selectorate Committee, whose members are confirmed in votes by the remaining legislators. Appointment of the Selectorate Committee would favor senior members and members with high standing in the Menghean Socialist Party. By law, the Speaker cannot appear on the Selectorate Committee. After convening, the Selectorate Committee solicits and reviews applications from other high-ranking cadres, and puts together a list of possible nominees for the position. This list can include the incumbent Chairman. Once the list is finalized, the Selectorate Committee places it before the National Assembly for a two-stage roll call vote, first considering all candidates, and then considering the two front-runners only. The winner must receive 140 votes to enter office; if the National Assembly is split 139 to 139, the incumbent First Deputy Chairman casts a tie-breaking vote.

In actuality, the National Assembly has never formed a Selectorate Committee: Choe Sŭng-min won every confidence vote since the first National Assembly session in 1989, when he was the de facto incumbent in the transition from the Interim Council for National Restoration. The 1989 and 1994 confidence votes were conducted with a shouted vote by acclamation, but after the launching of the Disciplined Society Campaign and the growth of Choe's personality cult, elections from 1999 onward have been carefully choreographed to prevent any display of opposition: the resolution asks first whether the Chairman should continue in office, and after the "yea" votes are heard, the Speaker declares that a clear majority has been reached and cancels the nay vote. This procedure is not explicitly called for in the 1990 constitution, but rather emerged as an informal tradition at the request of the General-Secretary of the MSP, concurrently Choe Sŭng-min since 1993.

Reform of the selection procedure

By design, the constitutional provisions and procedural rules surrounding the election of the Chairman of the Supreme Council heavily favored veteran politicians, including the incumbent Chairman. Furthermore, although neither constitutional nor legislative procedure called for the direct involvement of a ruling-party organ, as long as most representatives and all Selectorate Committee members were members of the Menghean Socialist Party, the Party leadership was in a strong position to influence the outcome indirectly.

In all selections since 1999, the outcome of the confidence vote has not even been counted, to prevent any formal record stating that representatives voted against Choe Sŭng-min. Particularly after this point, both domestic and international observers widely regarded the Chairman selection process as a rubber-stamp formality in which Choe's re-election was a foregone conclusion.

Political scientists and Menghe experts generally consider the 1994 election to have been semi-competitive, in that there was a real possibility of Choe losing and another inside challenger winning. Official rhetoric in these early years of the regime was divided on whether the Supreme Council and its Chairmanship were meant as permanent ruling institutions; during the late 1980s, several top newspapers asserted that the 1994 election would abolish the Selection Committee and use a conventional parliamentary procedure to select a prime minister as national executive. Choe's consolidation of power in the mid-to-late 1990s quashed these proposals, confirming for some scholars that Choe believed the 1994 election was not a guaranteed victory.

From the mid-1990s onward, the Menghean Socialist Party openly defended the persistence of the Chairmanship selection process on the grounds that it insulates the head of state from the unpredictable winds of popular opinion. Defenders of the system argued that it maintained long-term continuity in the executive leadership and gave the Chairman leeway to implement decisions that might be unpopular in the short term but beneficial in the long term. Official rhetoric also drew connections between the Selectorate Committee system and principles of meritocracy and gerontocracy in past Menghean dynasties, justifying an indirectly elected executive as consistent with "Menghean values" or "Menghean-style democracy."

Right up to the end of Choe's time in office, these views held fairly widespread purchase among the Menghean population. A 2018 survey by the Center for Governance Research found that only 37% of Menghean adult citizens thought the government should amend the constitution to replace the Chairman with a directly elected President; independent surveys by foreign scholars have reached similar figures, varying with the wording of the proposal. Because only one person has held the post of Chairman, support for electoral reform is closely tied up with support for Choe Sŭng-min, who remained widely popular and cultivated a pervasive personality cult. Even so, the same surveys have found that younger citizens were significantly more supportive of an elected executive position, with 48% of 19-to-25-year-olds agreeing that the head of state should be subject to a direct election. Pro-reform activist organizations, including some based in Banbha and Dayashina, sought to leverage this generational gap as a way to push for revisions to the selection process in the 2019 election.

In 2019, the Ministry of Civil Affairs gave in to this reformist pressure, allowing independent candidates to run for office for the first time. The National Assembly did not, however, amend the Constitution to directly elect the Chairman of the Supreme Council, nor did the new Speaker, Gam Jun-chŏl, alter the customary vote of confidence. Several opposition lawmakers immediately challenged the cancellation of the "nay" vote, demanding that a formal electronic roll call be held. Speaker Gam refused to acknowledge the motion, but the disruption continued until guards temporarily removed the objecting representatives from the hall.

Terms of address

The title of "Chairman of the Supreme Council of Menghe" was often shortened to "Chairman" (의장 / 議長, Yijang). In most contexts, this title was given the honorary suffix -nim, yielding yijangnim - a common practice when referring to higher-ranked posts in Menghean. By law, the holder of the post of Chairman was to be be addressed as Gakha (각하 / 閣下), meaning "His Excellency" or "His Highness."

Unlike Anglian, the Menghean language does not have specifically male or female forms of the word "Chairman;" yijang is gender-neutral by default. A few translations use "Chairperson" in place of "Chairman," but as the only people to have ever held this position were male, the gendered term "Chairman" is by far the most common in Anglian translations.

See also

• Supreme Council of Menghe
• National Assembly (Menghe)
• Menghean Socialist Party
• Government of Menghe