Backpedaling from generous campaign promises risks Park’s self-image of ‘trust and principle’

By Cho Hye-jeong, staff reporter

“I was fooled, and so was the public.”

These words were famously directed at Lee Myung-bak by Park Geun-hye at the time of the so-called “nomination massacre” against Park’s supporters in the 2008 parliamentary elections. Now that she is president-elect, though, Park seems to be hearing those same words herself - the result of her alleged backpedaling on election pledges.

Perhaps the most prominent example has been her promise for a 100% government guarantee on treatment costs for four major categories of serious illness. Following recent media reports that Park had retooled her platform to exclude elective treatment, deluxe hospital rooms, and nursing charges from the benefits, her transition committee issued a press release on Feb. 6 stating that these were “obviously” never included in her promise to have the state bear all costs for the illnesses in question. In other words, Park hadn’t changed her pledge - the areas in question were never part of the guarantee in the first place. The entry on her list of pledges read “incremental increase in the rate of guarantee (including non-payment categories) from its current 75% to 85% in 2013, 90% in 2014, 95% in 2015, and 100% in 2016.”

Experts called the rebuttal unconvincing. Appearing on the MBC radio talk show “Focus with Son Seok-hee,” Kim Yeon-myung, a professor in the Chung-Ang University department of social welfare, countered that the idea of a 75% rate of guarantee included the lack of coverage for elective treatment costs or deluxe hospital room. Based on this, he said that those areas “had to be understood as part” of the plan for increasing the coverage rate to 100%.

The basic old age pension is another area where Park is being accused of going back on her promises. During her campaign, she said the basic old age pension would be expanded into a universal basic pension, giving 200,000 won (US$182) to all seniors aged 65 and older as of 2013. But the basic pension plan being developed by her transition committee has payment of basic pension benefits scaled according to income level and national pension enrollment.

Other pledges - writing off household debt, enacting measures for the “house poor,” building so-called “happiness housing,” and cutting the mandatory military service period to 18 months - also have the potential to have voters claiming Park pulled the rug out from under them if they fail to make their way into actual policy.

The reason that “backpedaling” charges are flying over major parts of Park’s platform, before her policies have even taken definite shape, is because the pledges themselves - most of them one-sentence declarations - were too vague and simplistic in the first place. As an example, Park did not give any specifics on the scope of what she described as “non-payment categories” in her four major illness treatment pledge. Voters understood them in common sense terms as being all areas not currently covered by health insurance. Indeed, many press reports at the time assumed this to be the case. With Park’s camp declining to speak out at the time to clarify any misunderstandings, it stands to reason that the president-elect would now face be accused of backpedaling after waiting until now to do so.

Similarly, the basic pension pledge should have been much more carefully and explicitly crafted than it was, given the need to consider factors such as income level, national pension enrollment period, and fairness between national pension recipients and non-recipients, as well as the possibility for different precedents to emerge. Instead, the candidate made a pledge that was easy to understand, promising “200,000 won to everyone over 65.” She repeated this countless times, leaving herself wide open to charges of misrepresentation.

In some sense, Park has backed herself into a corner. By underestimating how much her pledges would cost to implement - in her zeal to stay in the public’s favor by insisting that she would not raise taxes at the moment - she exposed herself to charges from both left and right that her programs are not feasible. Indeed, some of the people who helped develop the pledges are now saying that the cost to the state needs to be recalculated, with the social service budget in particular coming out smaller than predicted.

Some within the Saenuri Party (NFP) are now saying the platform’s priorities need to be recalibrated - or even that the entire platform, which was tailored for the election, needs to be rethought. Park has distanced herself from these calls, saying it is “premature to talk now about whether it’s feasible or not to do the things I pledged during the election” and that “the only way to build trust in the government is to keep the promises made to the people.”

But a key party figure said the claims may give her just the out she needs. “Ultimately, Park Geun-hye is going to have to state her platform, and she can’t do anything that would hurt her image of being about ‘principle and trust,’ since that’s her brand,” the figure explained. “So in some sense, the party’s criticisms are creating a kind of alibi for her.”

　

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