President Park Geun-hye pressed political parties Monday to embrace reform and concentrate their efforts on improving people’s livelihoods.
She also expressed hope that political parties will regain public trust and public officials will root out corruption and address what she calls abnormalities across the country.
Park made the comments in a meeting with more than 200 officials, including the prime minister, top officials of her ruling Saenuri Party and the parliamentary speaker, at Cheong Wa Dae, South Korea’s presidential office.
Park’s latest appeal came as the National Assembly shows no signs of passing a set of bills that Park says could help reform South Korea’s labor markets and revitalize the country’s economy.
In September, labor, management and the government produced a landmark deal to ease labor restrictions. The deal would allow companies to dismiss workers who are either negligent or underperforming.
No follow-up parliamentary measures have been taken.
South Korea “cannot get out of difficult times if we fail to make changes and reform,” Park said in a new year meeting with officials, noting the country’s future is at stake.
Still, National Assembly Speaker Chung Ui-hwa renewed his opposition to invoking his authority to take a set of economic bills to the floor and put them to a vote.
Under the National Assembly Act, a National Assembly speaker can table a bill to a plenary session for a vote in the event of a natural disaster, state emergency or under an agreement between rival parties.
Chung said he told Park’s chief of staff Lee Byung-kee at the meeting that economic bills and the issue of redrawing the electoral constituency map are two separate issues.
Chung said he would table the issue of redrawing the electoral constituency map to the floor for a vote, without giving a specific time frame.
The current electoral map became invalid by the end of last year.
The rival parties are required to redraw electoral districts as the Constitutional Court ruled in October 2014 that the electoral map was unconstitutional, citing unequal representation.
No opposition lawmakers attended the meeting at the presidential office. (Yonhap)
