UPDATE - SKoreans protest against president in record numbers

UPDATES THROUGHOUT

By Alex Jensen

SEOUL (AA) - Cities across South Korea featured an increasingly familiar sight Saturday, as 2.3 million citizens nationwide reportedly rallied for a sixth weekend in a row to demand President Park Geun-hye’s resignation “immediately”.

Park faces the possibility of becoming her country’s first sitting president to be impeached after being linked to a scam involving forced company donations and allegedly allowing an unofficial confidante to secretly influence state affairs.

With protest organizers estimating that 1.7 million people had gathered in Seoul alone, the capital was again the focal point in this series of peaceful, almost party-atmosphere protests -- but there were also depictions of Park in handcuffs and flames rising above torches held aloft by some participants.

Having been granted legal permission to demonstrate closer than ever before to the presidential office -- 100 meters away -- protesters expressed their impatience with Park, who offered to step down Tuesday on the seemingly impossible condition that the country’s deadlock-prone parliament agrees on an appropriate transition because a change in leadership is not scheduled until early 2018.

As the ruling Saenuri Party carries the blame for delaying the liberal bloc’s planned impeachment vote last week, thousands of people also descended on the headquarters of the conservative camp to call for its dissolution.

At least 28 Saenuri votes will be required to ensure a two-thirds majority if a vote takes place according to a new timeline next Friday -- and there are theoretically enough rebel lawmakers from the party’s anti-Park faction to oust the president.

But even conservatives disloyal to the president have been swayed by her conditional offer to step down, given the temptation of setting a longer transition period and having more time to regain lost political ground than would be possible in the case of an impeachment.

Elsewhere, as many as 30,000 Park supporters staged their own counter-protest in Seoul despite her Gallup Korea approval rating staying at a record-low four percent after weeks in the single-digit range.