On the 14th, Joo posted on his Facebook page under the headline, “You said you’d be everyone’s president—are you practicing selective governance in Daegu and North Gyeongsang?” He said that although the president vowed in his inaugural address to be “everyone’s president,” the situation surrounding the Daegu–North Gyeongsang administrative integration is far from that promise.
Joo highlighted what he called a fairness problem by comparing the swift handling of the Gwangju–South Jeolla integration law with the stalled Daegu–North Gyeongsang measure.
“The South Jeolla–Gwangju special law passed the National Assembly plenary session on the 1st, and on the 5th the Cabinet, chaired by the president, approved and promulgated it,” he said. “By contrast, the Daegu–North Gyeongsang special law hasn’t even cleared the Legislation and Judiciary Committee and hasn’t reached the plenary session.”
“If one regional integration is fast-tracked while another is put on hold, the public will see it not as integration but as ‘selective governance,’” he added.
Joo also cited the president’s inaugural line that “integration is a sign of competence and division is the result of incompetence.”
“Who is responsible for the sense of deprivation and relative grievance people in the region feel over the Daegu–North Gyeongsang integration issue?” he asked. “If the president and the ruling party truly focused only on the public’s problems, they would have applied fair standards to bill processing. Instead, the path opened only for South Jeolla–Gwangju while Daegu–North Gyeongsang was left with nothing but ‘let’s wait and see.’”
While acknowledging that the Daegu City Council opposed the bill and that local disagreements exist, Joo stressed there were no procedural problems.
“The bill passed the Daegu City Council and the North Gyeongsang Provincial Council, and it cleared the National Assembly’s Public Administration and Security Committee through bipartisan agreement,” he said. “Even in Honam, there were opposing views, but the bill still moved forward.”
Joo argued that the president and the ruling party should apply the same principles and procedures to every regional integration, rather than pushing a particular region’s bill first. “If the president spoke of building bridges of coexistence, reconciliation, and solidarity in his inaugural address, he should not have fostered distrust among regions in practice,” he said.
He concluded: “The president himself said he would use Park Chung-hee’s policies or Kim Dae-jung’s policies without discrimination if needed. What we need now are fair standards that do not divide regions. If a measure furthers balanced national development, it should be judged by the same standard whether it concerns Yeongnam or Honam. I urge the president to make that decision.”
