hankyoreh

President Yoon Suk-yeol speaks at a Cabinet meeting held at the presidential office in Yongsan, Seoul, on July 18. (Yonhap)

While speaking Tuesday about the government’s response to historic flooding, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol promised to “fully revoke all the subsidies going to vested-interest cartels and corrupt cartels and divert that funding to compensating damage and rebuilding after the flood.” Critics say that Yoon linked a national disaster that claimed dozens of lives to his vendetta against “vested-interest cartels” and exploited the disaster to stir up division and snipe at his political enemies.

Yoon made the comments in a Cabinet meeting held at the presidential office in Yongsan, Seoul, on Tuesday.

“The government will mobilize all available resources to speed up the rescue and recovery work and to assist the victims. We will designate the affected areas as special disaster zones as quickly as possible and devote all resources at the government’s disposal, including repair crews, disaster funds and reserve funds,” Yoon said.

Yoon made the comments about canceling subsidies for the “vested-interest and corrupt cartels” and diverting them to flood recovery efforts after remarking that “taxpayers’ hard-earned money should be used to comfort taxpayers in pain.”

“Slash all the political subsidies for vested-interest cartels and corrupt cartels and use it to fully compensate farmers for crop failures and residents of towns hit by landslides. Be prodigal in using government funding to ease people’s pain,” Yoon’s spokesperson quoted him as saying in his closing remarks.

An official at the presidential office explained to the Hankyoreh that Yoon’s point was that “a sufficient amount of government funds should be spent on the flood recovery and that unnecessary government subsidies in all departments should be trimmed in next year’s government budget.”

“The president was instructing us to reduce all unreasonable subsidies to zero. We won’t be drafting any supplementary budget that would leave future generations in debt,” another official yet.

“We haven’t finished defining exactly which subsidies should be categorized as going to the vested-interest cartel or how much they amount to altogether,” a third official said.

Those remarks suggest that Yoon didn’t have a specific amount of money in mind when he spoke of slashing subsidies.

Yoon’s off-the-cuff comments that jumbled together his campaign against “cartel subsidies” with government funding for the flood recovery prompted criticism from not only the opposition party but also his own party for using a national disaster to bash civic groups and other political foes.

“[The flood damage] shouldn’t be exploited politically for a rant about vested-interest cartels. What we need is a practical way of raising money for the flood recovery, and the government needs to seriously consider a supplementary budget as a means of doing so,” said Kim Han-kyu, the floor spokesperson for the main opposition Democratic Party.

Justice Party spokesperson Kim Ga-yeong voiced her criticism as well. “The president ought to have his hands full simply preparing for the disaster response and restoring discipline among public officials who keep shifting the blame around. But instead, all he’s thinking about is how to squeeze the unions and civic groups, which he insists on calling a cartel.”

“If he had any shame, he wouldn’t go on about the cartels again after this kind of tragedy,” said Yoo Seong-min, a former lawmaker with the ruling People Power Party, on his Facebook page.

“‘Vested-interest cartel’ is political jargon, and ‘flood recovery’ is an urgent issue we’re facing. Combining the two was [Yoon’s] first mistake. Proposing to fund the recovery with undefined subsidies without any obvious way to calculate them was his second mistake,” said Lee Jun-seok, the former leader of the People Power Party.

“The advisor who suggested sending that kind of message should be canned on the spot,” Lee wrote.

By Bae Ji-hyun, staff reporter; Shin Min-jung, staff reporter

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