People Power Party Floor Leader Jeong Jeom-sik speaks at a supreme council meeting at the National Assembly on Thursday. [Yonhap]
People Power Party Floor Leader Jeong Jeom-sik speaks at a supreme council meeting at the National Assembly on Thursday. [Yonhap]

People Power Party Floor Leader Jeong Jeom-sik warned Thursday that pushing ahead with the appointment of Justice Minister nominee Kim Seung-won — who has a drunk-driving conviction — would expand what he called a "cabinet of criminals" to a total of 35 prior convictions. Jeong also said everyone knows the real reason the ruling party is pressing so hard for Kim is to secure the withdrawal of criminal charges against President Lee Jae Myung.

Speaking at a supreme council meeting at the National Assembly on Thursday morning, Jeong said the Democratic Party had declared Kim qualified for the justice minister post on the grounds that he had no serious disqualifying factors. "The current cabinet, including a president with four prior convictions, already has a combined total of 34 convictions among its key figures," he said.

"The Lee Jae Myung administration is itself a structurally criminal cabinet," Jeong said. "With so many people with criminal records, what is the point of the Democratic Party even debating whether someone is disqualified?" He added that the government and the ruling party were "running roughshod over personnel appointments with no regard for the people," calling it "a declaration of war against the public."

Jeong said President Lee's approval rating had hit a record low, yet the president was "clinging to his own political security and policy stubbornness." He added that the latest cabinet reshuffle was "pouring fuel on public anger," and described Kim's confirmation hearing as "a tearful melodrama starring the arts-faculty oppa."

"Even a majority of the public — and even the pro-ruling-party People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy — oppose this, yet they are pressing ahead," Jeong said. "Everyone knows the reason for this reckless move lies in dropping the charges in the president's trial."

He went on to criticize the other nominees, saying the candidates for the Defense Ministry, Ministry of Finance and Economy, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, and Ministry of SMEs and Startups were "all real estate speculators by the Lee Jae Myung administration's own standards." He said the appointments exposed "the raw sense of privilege unique to the left — always strict with the public, always lenient with their own."

Jeong said the Justice Ministry nominee faced allegations of solicitation lobbying, while the Land Ministry nominee had taken out loans to the limit to buy an apartment. The Defense Ministry nominee, he said, had proposed abolishing his own alma mater, the Korea Military Academy, and the SMEs Ministry nominee had backed the so-called Yellow Envelope Act, which he described as anti-business legislation. "Even if you tried to hand-pick only unqualified candidates, you could not assemble a lineup this unqualified," Jeong said.

Separately, Jeong addressed the chaos surrounding the university early-admissions application period, calling it a failure of the Ministry of Education's oversight responsibilities. "Over this application fiasco, Education Minister Choi Kyo-jin and all those responsible must resign," he said.

He said the core problem was that university acceptance-rate data had been made public during a one-hour extension of the application window. "Students who submitted applications after seeing the published figures gained an advantage, while those who applied earlier were put at a disadvantage — this is a matter of fairness," he said. He called on the Ministry of Education to take "firm and principled action" to ensure that students who applied early were not left to suffer unfairly from the irregularity.


yeonjoo7@heraldcorp.com