Oh Se-hoon slams farmland probe, says Lee government fights citizens instead of real challenges

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon on Sunday sharply criticized the government's nationwide farmland survey, saying President Lee Jae Myung's "obsession with actual residency" has now extended into an "obsession with actual cultivation," and calling on the president to stop treating ordinary citizens as targets.

Writing on Facebook that day, Oh said the government was "measuring the complex lives of citizens by a single yardstick under the pretext of curbing speculation, and treating anyone who falls outside it as a potential speculator."

He said citizens had already felt the side effects of the Lee Jae Myung government's real estate policy over the past year, arguing that authorities had "pushed regulations first under the banner of actual residency, then tacked on exceptions and fixes each time the rules collided with reality."

Oh said a similar pattern was playing out in agriculture. "They started by declaring that anyone not personally farming the land is a speculator, but as concerns grew that this did not fit rural realities, they said they would make exceptions for unavoidable circumstances such as old age, illness and inheritance," he said.

"The problem is that reality is always more complicated than the handful of exceptions the government has decided to allow," Oh said.

He added that it was "arrogant and self-righteous" for the government to believe it could perfectly distinguish between speculators and good-faith landowners by scrutinizing every individual circumstance. "As a result, ordinary citizens are always left anxious and on edge," he said.

Oh said the government was "labeling people as speculators and vested interests in the name of reform and shouting slogans about cracking down on them," and argued the reason lay in the Lee Jae Myung government's lack of a governing vision.

He went on to say the president should be showing citizens a future — "what South Korea will live on going forward, how it will build competitiveness amid the sweeping shift toward AI and advanced industries, and what kind of future it will open up for young people." Instead, Oh said, "this government came to power through the martial law crisis without having prepared such a vision, and so fighting — designating someone as a target to be toppled and purged — has become the core of governance."

Oh said genuine national reform tied to people's lives and futures was "on a completely different level from so-called crackdown-style valley cleanups," and urged the president to "stop looking for targets to crack down on among the citizenry."

"Citizens who own homes and citizens who own land are not adversaries the president should be fighting," he said. "The real adversaries are elsewhere — a rapidly shifting security environment, the reshaping of the global economic order, low growth and a low birth rate, a crisis in industrial competitiveness, and the vanishing opportunities for young people."

Oh closed by urging the president to "fight for the people, not against them," warning that "public expectations of the government are cooling fast" and expressing hope that "the president will fully feel the temperature of this public sentiment."