Lee's approval rating remains below 50% for 2nd straight week: poll

President Lee Jae Myung's approval rating has fallen for six consecutive weeks to 46.5 percent, a poll showed Monday. In the poll commissioned by the EKN newspaper and conducted by Realmeter, Lee's approval rating went down 0.

2 percentage point from a week earlier last week, while disapproval of his performance also fell 0.2 percentage point to 49.5 percent.

It marked the second consecutive week that Lee's approval rating stayed below 50 percent in a Realmeter poll. Realmeter attributed the decline to the prolonged controversy over the National Election Commission's mishandling of ballots during the June 3 local elections and growing concerns over the economy and people's livelihoods, as well as political disputes over the planned abolition of the prosecution's right to conduct supplementary investigations. The weekly survey, conducted on 2,502 people aged 18 and older from Monday to Friday, had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.

In a separate survey conducted by the same pollster, support for the ruling Democratic Party of Korea rose