As expected, President Park Geun-hye used her annual budget proposal address at the National Assembly to put pressure on the opposition to give in to her administration’s push to replace Korean history textbooks for middle and high school students with state-authored ones.

She said the current textbooks offer wrong descriptions of history and history education cannot be normalized without addressing the problem. “I will not sit idle with textbooks that distort history,” Park said. 

Park’s hard-line comments had been anticipated, but they are certain to add fuel to the confrontation over the controversial plan, which is getting uglier day by day. On Sunday night, a group of opposition lawmakers attempted to raid the National Institute for International Education in central Seoul, alleging that the government is operating a “secret task force” on the plan for state-authored textbooks.

Police kept the opposition members from storming into the building and the confrontation continued into the following day, with the officials kept inside the building. 

One may support or oppose the plan for state-authored textbooks, but if the government is working on a plan, it would follow they would have a group of officials involved in the plan. The scene of opposition members putting the officials under an apparent siege illustrates the backwardness of Korean politics.

There is another case that illustrates how hard politics sway the dispute over the school textbooks. Opposition members and critics of the government plan claim that the conservative ruling camp is trying to write history textbooks with descriptions favorable to pro-Japanese and pro-military dictatorship figures. This apparently refers to President Park’s father, the late President Park Chung-hee, who served in the Japanese military and ruled the country with an iron fist for 18 years. 

Now the same people accuse the father of ruling party leader Kim Moo-sung, who ran a successful textile company, of having engaged in pro-Japanese activities during the colonial period. Kim flatly denies the allegation. 

Issues like these have little to do with the core issue of the dispute -- which are problems with the current history textbooks and how to redress them.

Without tackling the key issue and trying to sit together to discuss it, the ruling and opposition parties -- and more broadly conservatives and liberals -- are going all out in their respective campaigns.

As things stand, Park and the ruling camp is on the defensive, with opinion polls showing supporters are outnumbered by those who oppose the plan and an increasing number of historians and professors, including foreign scholars of Korean studies, joining the protest.

As Park said in her parliamentary speech, there is a stack of national agenda items awaiting action by the government and the National Assembly -- including deliberation of the state budget for next year, ratification of the Korea-China free trade agreement and the labor reform bills, to say the least.

Given Park’s hard-line stance and the opposition’s defiance -- opposition members put notes reading “Oppose state-authored textbooks” and “People’s Livelihood First” on their laptops while Park was on the podium -- it is difficult to foresee when the parliament will be able to get back to doing its job.