The ruling and opposition parties are on collision course yet again, having barely moved on from the deadlock over bills concerning the sunken ferry Sewol.
Over the weekend, the ruling Saenuri Party and the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy managed to reach an agreement on the so-called “three Sewol bills,” barely managing to keep their promise to finish discussions by the end of October.
Although the months-long deadlock is now over, the parties are expected to lock horns over the issues of next year’s government budget, and various economic stimulus bills and measures. In addition, the rekindled talks of amending the Constitution, and the NPAD’s demands for parliamentary investigations into the previous administration’s four-rivers project and the so-called “natural resource diplomacy” and irregularities in defense projects threatens to mire the parties in yet another deadlock.
Although the two parties’ leaders have agreed to pass the budget by Dec. 2 at the latest, the differences in the two parties’ positions on the economic plans are likely to bog down the processes.
The ruling party is of the position that the government’s “economy reviving budget” must be kept intact, but the NPAD has been stepping up its attack on “Choinomics.”
In his address to the National Assembly on Oct. 30, NPAD interim leader Rep. Moon Hee-sang raised the issue, saying that the economic policies rolled out under Deputy Prime Minister Choi Kyung-hwan had entirely failed.
In contrast to the ruling party, the main opposition is to focus on resisting the government’s plans for what it calls a “tax hike for the common people, and a tax cut for the rich.”
The NPAD also plans to cut the budget allocated to projects started under the Lee Myung-bak administration including those concerning the four-rivers project.
The 30 so-called “people’s livelihood bills” will also be a major stumbling block for the National Assembly during the remainder of the year.
With President Park Geun-hye having stressed the need for the bills to be passed on 59 occasions in her policy address on Oct. 29, the Saenuri Party plans to throw its full weight behind pushing them through by Dec. 9.
The NPAD, however, has declared many of the bills as “fakes” and drawn up 25 bills of its own that are supposedly aimed at improving the economic situation of the ordinary people.
The main opposition, however, has declared that the bills will not be grouped together, and uncontroversial bills may be processed with relative ease.
Clumping bills together and preventing their being processed in the parliament is a tactic commonly used by the smaller of the two main parties to gain leverage on tightly contested issues.
By Choi He-suk (cheesuk@heraldcorp.com)
