People Power Party chief spokesperson Choi Bo-yun [Yonhap]
People Power Party chief spokesperson Choi Bo-yun [Yonhap]

The People Power Party on Thursday condemned Cheong Wa Dae's decision to promote 68 of its staff members, calling it a "lavish promotion party for themselves alone."

Chief spokesperson Choi Bo-yun issued a statement saying that with the entire country "screaming under an unprecedented livelihood economic crisis," Cheong Wa Dae should be sharing in the pain, rushing to the scene and working through the night to find solutions.

Choi said Cheong Wa Dae had "carried out a self-graded bonus-style personnel reshuffle by asking employees to write down the three things they had done best." She questioned whether driving ordinary citizens into housing insecurity through jeonse fraud and soaring jeonse and monthly rent costs — and destroying market confidence to send the stock market into a panic — were the "great achievements" that Cheong Wa Dae civil servants had proudly put on paper.

She added that "with the economy as ordinary people experience it in complete ruin, the spectacle of them praising themselves through subjective self-assessments and raising a toast among themselves is nothing short of extreme moral hazard and mockery of the public." She also said the presidential office had used the flimsy excuse of launching without a transition committee to bloat its secretariat by nearly 100 people in just one year, and that the purpose had "ultimately turned out to be a promotion party for taking care of their own."

Choi went on to say that "while ordinary people are tightening their belts because every penny counts, the civil servants at the core of this administration are busy dividing up the sweet taste of power on the public's dime." She called it "the complacent true face of an administration drunk on internal advancement with no sense of responsibility as a policy control tower for stabilizing people's livelihoods."

Turning to the legislative situation, Choi said the Democratic Party was "forcing through an amendment to the Code of Criminal Procedure that would completely abolish prosecutors' supplementary investigative powers and abruptly add a vague 'dismissal of indictment' clause, while completely abandoning livelihood legislation." She added that the party was "openly revealing its shameless scheme to erase the president's legal risk and extend his term by toying with constitutional reform options such as shortening the term or allowing re-election."

Choi also said that "using the National Assembly to erect a 'dismissal of indictment' shield on the outside while being consumed on the inside with internal cohesion through a 'promotion party' is the behavior of an administration that has lost not only any sense of responsibility for its failures but even the most basic sense of shame." She stressed that "the public's stern judgment will firmly come down on this self-righteous administration that ignores the people's suffering and focuses solely on the regime's own survival and their private celebration."


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