If there was one group of Koreans that stood to benefit from 45 consecutive days of mass, candle-lit protests in the centre of Seoul, it should have been the candle makers.

Over the past six weeks, and with over half a million people thronging the streets to condemn their President in “mad cow” hysteria, they have sold more candles than they would normally shift in a year.

Even now the public’s desire to use wax when parading its fury shows no sign of subsiding. But in what is rapidly emerging as Asia’s most sensitive “barometer economy”, even South Korea’s candle makers are in trouble.

The paraffin they use to make the candles has, like the price of crude oil, doubled in the last year and the profit margins are tiny. On the grander scale, the rest of the country is being squeezed in much the same way and everyone – from the supremos of Samsung to market ginseng vendors – can feel that something is wrong.

The massive protests that brought the South Korean capital to a standstill last week and put 20,000 riot police on their highest state of alert may appear to be about Government plans to re-start imports of US beef. But nobody believes that any more.

Certainly, the marches began because of the new President’s decision to re-start imports of US beef after a five-year hiatus. Lee Myung Bak was elected in a record landslide in December and took office in February with his “bulldozer” nickname and reputation at the forefront of public expectations. Within a few months of running the country, however, that reputation has shifted from asset to liability.

The marchers’ doubt is not that Mr Lee is a competent leader – although many were screaming for his resignation – but that his management style is too corporate for a public mood that swings wildly between capitalism and Confucianism.

Shaun Cochran, head of Korea research at CLSA Asia Pacific Markets, told The Times that, while the beef negotiations had provided a lightning rod for political opposition groups, the central issue remains a question of style. The protests and the complex issues that lie behind them, he said, could generate the need “for the bulldozer to turn horse-trader”.

To make matters worse, the former Hyundai executive is, for the moment at least, not providing the quick economic fixes that the voters expected. Unions fear a Thatcher-style assault on their power, bureaucrats fear a steamrollering of their influence, the ordinary Korean fears that his or her views will simply be ignored.

And beef has been the flashpoint for all of that. South Korea was America’s third largest destination for its beef until a case of BSE was found in US cattle in 2003: the meat is now deemed safe by American scientists but, despite repeated assurances by Washington, many Koreans are unconvinced.

The marches have become an excuse to complain indirectly about everything that seems out of kilter with South Korea – from the authoritarian leadership style of its President, to the soaring cost of filling up a truck with diesel, to the fact that people are stealing dustbins for the scrap metal. Supermarkets are running lotteries with a tank of petrol as the prize and insurance companies that offer a free five litres of fuel to any policy holder who runs out of petrol on the road have seen a sudden spate of apparent roadside emergencies.

These are the ructions, say analysts, of a society at the cutting edge of the global economy: a country that grew rich in an era of cheap oil, cheap shipping and cheap food, but is now among the first to feel the strain as that system swings into reverse.

Both Korea’s economic spasms and the extraordinary public backlash against Mr Lee’s stance on US beef are symptoms of the country’s unique sensitivities to current affairs. In the first instance, Korea is perhaps the most open economy in Asia.

Its government has stood by as the won has slid against the US dollar while almost every other leading currency has surged – this has helped exports, but made the cost of importing energy increasingly intolerable. It is a country that exports high-end goods and is deeply dependent on global trade. Its economy is dominated by steelmakers, shipbuilders, carmakers and electronics groups – industries whose pips squeak noisily when iron ore, oil, and precious metal prices rocket. Above all, it derives much sensitivity from its levels of leverage, which are higher than elsewhere in Asia and derive from the fact that Korea’s banks have never lost their endemic appetite for risk.

But at the social level it is also a country where issues that might, in other democracies, remain buried, make it on to the streets. Korea’s unrivalled saturation of broadband internet connection means that its democracy is arguably the most digitised in the world. Mass movements – along with mass hysteria, mass outrage and mass condemnation – are whipped up with greater efficiency than almost anywhere else. In a recent research note to investors, one economist described Koreans as “world class protesters” – regularly hitting the streets in numbers to demonstrate on issues that would struggle to gain support elsewhere.

Political observers ascribe that propensity to protest as a feature of the relative youth of Korea’s democracy: the relatively belated transition from military to civilian rule has embedded exceptionally high public expectations in the powers of their successive leaders. Most Korean Presidents experience a slump in their popularity but none has plunged so far, so quickly as Mr Lee.

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