Former Daegu mayor takes to social media to assign blame to local politicians

'They strutted around doing nothing — they brought this on themselves'

Former Daegu Mayor Hong Joon-pyo. [Photo by Lee Sang-sub/babtong@]
Former Daegu Mayor Hong Joon-pyo. [Photo by Lee Sang-sub/babtong@]

Former Daegu Mayor Hong Joon-pyo said local lawmakers from Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province had only themselves to blame after they denounced the government's large-scale semiconductor investment plan for the Honam region as "regional discrimination."

In a Facebook post Tuesday, Hong said that during his time as South Gyeongsang Province governor and later as Daegu mayor, he had paid off all 1.4 trillion won ($909 million) in provincial debt, bringing it to zero, and repaid 200 billion won of Daegu's debt. "I poured everything into a 50-year vision for South Gyeongsang and a 100-year vision for Daegu," he said.

He said he had worked to transform Daegu — once mocked as a "Gotham City" — into a place young people would want to return to, and placed the blame for the city's decline squarely on its political class. "Daegu's deterioration is entirely the fault of local politicians," he said.

Hong said the city's political leaders had failed to act when the textile industry began to collapse 30 years ago. "They just held onto their seats and did nothing," he said. He added that after three years of fighting alone without enough support to make further progress, he had stepped away to run for president again, and when that bid failed, he backed Kim Boo-kyum for the sake of Daegu's future.

"Those who go around saying I bear responsibility for Daegu's economic troubles are truly despicable," he said. "What ruined Daegu was you — people who don't know how to work, with nothing in your heads, strutting around calling yourselves lawmakers."

He said the lawmakers were now picking a fight over the semiconductor investment announcement, but that was entirely a consequence of their own failures. "Stop being the Galapagos," he said.

Hong had also posted on Facebook the previous day, saying he could not recall a single thing Daegu's lawmakers had done for the city during his tenure. "And yet you dare criticize me for supporting the Honam semiconductor plan in the name of balanced national development?" he said, again directing his remarks at local Assembly members.

Hong said that during his three years as Daegu mayor he had devoted himself to attracting and nurturing five new strategic industries, achieving more than two and a half times the investment of the previous decade and bringing in some 40 companies. He said the restructuring of the city's industrial base had been neglected by Daegu's politicians for more than 30 years, forcing him to start late. Not a single Daegu lawmaker had helped him as he pursued a new airport, a small modular reactor project in Gunwi, the Dalseong Second National Industrial Complex, a robot test field, an AI data center or an urban air mobility project, he said. "Not one of them helped me," he said, rebuffing the criticism directed at him.

"What right does a seat-warming lawmaker who does nothing have to criticize me?" he said. "You dismiss what I say about the nation's long-term future as mere flattery to the president? It is pitiful to watch you play the regional-sentiment card just to hold onto your seats because you lack the ability to do anything else."

He said the citizens of Daegu who elected such people deserved better. "No matter how hard I pushed for Daegu's rise, the mayor's power alone was not enough, so I ran for president again — and when that too fell through, I backed Kim Boo-kyum for Daegu's leap forward," he said. "How could sparrows ever understand the ambitions of a phoenix?"

Earlier, Choo Kyung-ho, the People Power Party mayor-elect of Daegu, had responded to the government's announcement that it would invest a total of 800 trillion won ($519 billion) to develop the Honam region into a second semiconductor production hub. "The future of advanced industries must be decided by competitiveness, not politics, and South Korea's semiconductor future cannot be drawn without Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province," Choo said.

North Gyeongsang Province Governor Lee Cheol-woo said he respected the government's plan to establish a back-end fabrication facility in Gwangju and South Jeolla Province as part of its "Southern Semiconductor Innovation Belt" initiative, but criticized the announcement as rendering meaningless years of effort by the National Assembly, the government and the public to enact the National Advanced Strategic Industries Act and designate a semiconductor special zone. "This measure undoes all of that in one stroke," he said.


jshan@heraldcorp.com