Chairman of the Supreme Council of Menghe
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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) is the head of state of the Socialist Republic of Menghe under its 1988 constitution. The holder of the position carries out their 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 amounts to direct control of the executive branch, the Chairmanship is the most powerful political position in Menghe, both in de jure and de facto terms.
Origin and history
The Supreme Council of Menghe is 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 serves as a continuation of Choe's role as Chairman of the Interim Council, and was deliberately designed around it in the 1988 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.
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.
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, representatives to the National Assembly vote to elect a nine-member Selectorate Committee. Members of this council are required to have served at least one prior term in the legislature, and in all selections since 1988, they have generally been well-regarded senior members.
Over the course of the next month, the Selectorate Committee reviews the personnel files of high-ranking government officials who meet the selection criteria - namely, deputy Chairmen, the heads of ministries, and Party officials of similar rank. There is no requirement that the incumbent Chairman be included, but he has been included on all selections since 1989. To prevent conflicts of interest, members of the Selectorate Committee are forbidden from nominating themselves, though they can nominate the Speaker of the National Assembly if he or she is not a committee member. All names on the list must be approved by consensus among the nine Selectorate Committee members.
After agreeing on a short list of names, the Selectorate Committee returns to the National Assembly and submits its list for their consideration. In the first round of voting, all names are voted on, and all representatives can only vote once; the two leading names are then taken to a second runoff round, in which an absolute majority (140 out of 278 members) is required for victory. If neither finalist reaches that threshold, the Speaker can either ask for a period of debate and consideration, followed by a repeat of the voting procedure, starting at the first round, or send the Selectorate Committee to draw up a new list of candidates. If, however, any candidate receives more than 140 votes in the first round, they are immediately declared the winner, and no vote is called on the remaining names.
An important procedural detail holds that if the incumbent Chairman, or a Deputy Chairman acting in his absence due to death or resignation, is included on the list, his name is read first in the voting list. This is not a requirement of the 1988 constitution, but a procedural rule adopted by the National Assembly. Voting in the first round is also performed by a show of hands, unless the Speaker decides that the margins are close enough to require a roll call.
Reform of the selection procedure
By design, the constitutional provisions and procedural rules surrounding the election of the Chairman of the Supreme Council heavily favor veteran politicians, including the incumbent Chairman. Furthermore, although neither constitutional nor legislative procedure calls for the direct involvement of a ruling-party organ, as long as most representatives and all Selectorate Committee members are members of the Menghean Socialist Party, the Party leadership is in a strong position to influence the outcome indirectly.
In all elections for the Chairmanship, Choe Sŭng-min's name has been called first, and he has received a "vast majority" of the first-round vote. The 1999 election was the only one in which he ran unopposed; in all other elections, at least four other names were on the list. But because candidates after the majority winner were not voted on, and because a roll-call repeat was never requested, the exact vote totals remain unknown. Chairman elections after 1999 are widely regarded as a rubber-stamp formality in which Choe's re-election is a foregone conclusion.
Political scientists and Menghe experts generally consider the 1989 and 1994 elections to have been fairly competitive, in that there was a real possibility of 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 has 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 have argued that it ensures all candidates have a high amount of prior political experience and are regarded as successful by their most senior peers, and that it gives the Chairman leeway to implement decisions that might be unpopular in the short term but beneficial in the long term. Official rhetoric has also drawn 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."
At present, these views hold fairly widespread purchase among the Menghean population. A 2018 survey by the Center for Governance Research found that only 37% of Menghean adult citizens think 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 remains widely popular and has cultivated a pervasive personality cult. Even so, the same surveys have found that younger citizens are 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 Tir Glas and Dayashina, have sought to leverage this generational gap as a way to push for revisions to the selection process in the 2019 election.
Terms of address
The title of "Chairman of the Supreme Council of Menghe" is often shortened to "Chairman" (의장 / 議長, Yijang). In most contexts, this title is 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 may be addressed as Gakha, 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 person to have ever held this position is male, the gendered term "Chairman" is generally by far the most common in Anglian translations.