The People Power Party on Monday called the Lee Jae-myung administration "a government that has abandoned the people, not one of popular sovereignty," urging the dismissal of Cheong Wa Dae policy chief Kim Yong-beom and demanding a parliamentary investigation and special prosecutor probe into single-stock leveraged exchange-traded funds.
PPP leader Jang Dong-hyeok made the remarks at a supreme council meeting at the National Assembly. "The Lee Jae-myung administration claimed to stand for popular sovereignty, but it abandoned the people long ago," Jang said. "President Lee said that policies harming people's lives are worse than doing nothing — yet he keeps rolling out exactly those kinds of policies: ones the public opposes, ones that only hurt them, ones that are worse than doing nothing."
Jang went on to say, "This is a president who pushes harder on the very things the public says not to do, and a ruling party that only presses forward with what the public opposes." He called for the immediate dismissal of Cheong Wa Dae policy chief Kim Yong-beom and said a parliamentary investigation and special prosecutor probe into single-stock leveraged ETFs must be carried out.
Jang said the government had moved to cut benefits under the individual savings account program, only for the president to later ask, as if it had nothing to do with him, why such a decision was made. "That is not something the president should be asking the government — it is something the people should be demanding of the president," he said.
He also said the real estate market had already become a nightmare under a barrage of regulations and lending controls, yet the president was now promising to eliminate the "marriage penalty." "Now they are even talking about turning decommissioned buses into youth housing," Jang said. "They want us to treat it as a minor slip — but is this really something to toss out casually to young people who have had to give up on their futures?"
He said the administration was staging "a free-for-all of nonsense that mocks youth and makes a fool of the public," and urged the Democratic Party to move its party headquarters and lawmakers' offices into decommissioned buses before telling young people to live in them.
PPP floor leader Jeong Jeom-sik proposed holding an emergency economic meeting bringing together the ruling party, the opposition and the government. "The Democratic Party is talking about ramming through bills at a plenary session on Thursday without resolving disagreements between the parties, but the livelihoods economy — stocks, real estate, prices — is in a state of emergency, and the government's policy direction needs a 180-degree turn," Jeong said.
He urged a full replacement of what he called the "blundering, ragtag" trio of Cheong Wa Dae chiefs and the cabinet, and called for a complete review of the live-streamed work briefings he said had devolved into a "Lee Jae-myung variety show." "If there is any sense of responsibility left, scrap the loan-restriction and tax-heavy real estate policy direction first, and hold accountable the policy officials who introduced single-stock leveraged ETFs," he said.
Jeong said the administration's biggest problem was what he called "irresponsible laboratory governance" — an approach of acting first and fixing problems later, as seen in its stance that issues arising from the abolition of supplementary investigative powers could simply be corrected after the fact. "It is reckless, hasty governance that treats side effects as an afterthought," he said.
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