Realizing that they may no longer be able to rely on their conventional supporters for next week’s general election, political parties are announcing new economic pledges daily, hoping to attract pragmatic centrist voters.

But the hastily drafted pledges mostly fail to suggest detailed solutions, rekindling concerns that they may once again end up as empty promises that fizzle out after the elections.
The ruling conservative Saenuri Party -- with former Finance Minister Kang Bong-kyun as chief policy strategist -- chose to focus on job creation, connecting its campaigns to President Park Geun-hye’s plan to revitalize the economy and unshackle the labor market.

The party’s key economic platforms are as follows: create jobs for youths by boosting corporate investment; implement a quantitative easing macroeconomic system; improve income distribution through tax revision; expand welfare support to socially disadvantaged clusters; improve the business environment for owner-operators; solve real estate problems; and accomplish the Park administration’s reform plans.

Though its list included some progressive issues, the gist of it was to stimulate economic growth. The concept of economic democratization, which the party had adopted as a key slogan back in the 2012 election, was nowhere to be seen.

A report released by the Economic Reform Research Institute on Thursday described the ruling party as “resuming its former persona as a typical conservative party.”

“The Saenuri Party’s pledges show that it has completely discarded economic democratization,” the report stated.

One of the representative pledges of the party is to create some 500,000 new jobs by establishing a special economic zone for companies that relocate their overseas sites back to South Korea.

The plan, however, failed to suggest a valid financing mechanism, as well as possible incentives that may lure firms back home.

Another controversy is the quantitative easing program to increase liquidity in the market and reduce household debt.

The party said Thursday that it would, in follow-up measures, revise the Bank of Korea Act so as to allow the nation’s central bank to purchase bonds of state-run banks.

But the BOK and the Ministry of Strategy and Finance indicated their resistance, as well as doubts, over the financial program.

Both Finance Minister Yoo Il-ho and BOK Gov. Lee Ju-yeol have been outspoken on the issue, failing to buttress the ruling party ahead of the upcoming election.
The Minjoo Party of Korea, steered by senior economist Kim Chong-in, chose to shore up the idea of economic democratization.

The forte of the main opposition party is its consistency -- having maintained its relatively progressive policy stance -- but its weakness is that most of the plans are a deja vu of the 2012 election campaigns.

The party’s key economic slogan is the “777 plan,” aimed at pulling up per capita gross national income, labor income share, and the proportion of middle class to the 70 percent mark.

“The 777 plan is more or less a copy of the Lee Myung-bak administration’s 747 plan or the Park Geun-hye government’s 474 plan,” said the Saenuri policy chief Kang, challenging Minjoo’s Kim to an economic policy debate.

The party’s goal to enforce a ban on the top 10 conglomerates’ cross-shareholding was also a revival of a similar pledge from 2012.

The opposition party also vowed to create 700,000 new jobs by expanding the youth employment quota in public organizations and to increase the legal minimum wage to 10,000 won ($8.7) per hour.

But it faced criticism that it was shifting economic responsibility to the public sector and that the figures announced were financially unsound.

“Not only do these economic pledges lack practicality, but they also tend to mislead voters, making them believe that a political party has the full discretion to implement its promises,” said an official of the Korea Manifesto Center.

By Bae Hyun-jung(tellme@heraldcorp.com)