Scrambling to deal with pending bills delayed by the sweeping political scandal and ensuing impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, the four major political parties on Friday agreed to hold an extraordinary parliamentary session in January.
The session will take place from Jan. 9-20, decided the floor leaders from the ruling and opposition parties in their first four-way meeting since the governing Saenuri Party’s split earlier this week.
They also agreed to accelerate efforts to build a parliamentary committee for Constitutional amendment. The basic law was last revised in 1987 when the nation embraced a direct presidential election, ending a decadeslong era of military dictatorship.
(Yonhap)
“I understand the people‘s concerns over this new four-party system, but we will uphold the spirit of cooperation during next year’s Assembly,” said the Assembly Speaker Rep. Chung Sye-kyun who hosted the whip meeting.
But such a roadmap is likely to face challenges as opposition parties seek to overhaul key initiatives of the president, who was suspended from power upon being impeached over the corruption scandal tied to her longtime friend Choi Soon-sil.
Topping the list are the decisions to deploy an advanced US missile battery in South Korea and adopt state-authored textbooks for secondary education. Park had pushed for these policies until she was impeached earlier this month over a corruption scandal involving herself and her close aides.
To achieve the goal, the opposition camp relies on their overwhelming majority in the 300-seat National Assembly. As of Friday, they had a combined total of 201 seats, while Saenuri holds 99 seats as their dissenters launched a new party with 30 lawmakers.
“We will build a forum to discuss how to enact bills to overhaul (Park’s policies),” said Rep. Woo Sang-ho, Floor Leader of the Democratic Party of Korea, asking for cooperation on the measure from his counterparts at People’s Party and New Conservative Party for Reform, Saenuri defectors’ new party.
Earlier in the day, Woo said that his party would push to pass the bills in next year’s National Assembly whose first regular session is scheduled to take place this February. In the meantime, the party would launch a task force to prepare for the legislation to clear the Assembly.
The opposition parties, however, has struggled to present a united front as their stance differed over contentious policies. Their ideological spectrum ranges from Saenuri defector’s conservatives and central-liberal’s from the Democratic Party and People’s Party.
For example, Saenuri defectors maintained that THAAD was crucial to countering North Korea’s growing military threat and that the measure should be implemented as planned. They vowed to inherit Saenuri’s hawkish stance on Pyeongyang.
The Democratic Party and People’s Party, however, demanded the government reserve their decision until the new president takes office next year. They had warned that the missile system could fail to fully protect the nation and blamed the government for its failure to go through a process of building public consent.
By Yeo Jun-suk(
jasonyeo@heraldcorp.com)
