By Korea Herald staff

Ahn Cheol-soo doesn’t want to be your mentor, if he was one in the first place. The doctor-venture entrepreneur-professor-turned-politician says he will become a fighter who faces up to the challenge in order to make Korea a better place for you.

“Mentor Ahn Cheol-soo, who in 2012 offered you consoling messages, thinks in 2016 that he must toughen up and become a real doer, fighter to change the world,” the centrist politician wrote via Facebook on Monday. He even called himself “Kang Cheol-soo,” a combination of his name and the Korean word for strength.

The founder of the third-biggest People’s Party hinted in August at his bid for the 2017 presidential election.

“Things are not getting better. It is to my great chagrin but things have gotten only worse in Korea. ... Today, I reflect on the days when I first started politics – how I wanted to create a hopeful future for the young people,” Ahn wrote.

An IT guru behind Korea’s No. 1 anti-virus software firm Ahn Lab, Ahn jumped into politics in 2012 amid polls that put him even ahead of President Park Geun-hye in the race for the nation’s top job.

During the campaign, however, he yielded to Moon Jae-in, the candidate from the main liberal opposition bloc, although his approval ratings were as competitive as Moon’s in a hypothetical one-on-one faceoff with Park.

South Korea will pick the successor to Park, whose single five-year term is to end in February 2018, in December 2017. 

Perhaps a hint of his toughened spirit, Ahn on Monday harshly criticized Park’s proposal for an amendment of the Constitution.

“Back in 2007, when President Roh Moo-hyun first proposed a revision to the Constitution, President Park had called him ‘a very bad president,’” he quipped.

(khnews@heraldcorp.com)