November 13, 2025
SEOUL – President Lee Jae Myung on Wednesday met leaders of local governments at his office in Seoul, where he promised to give them greater autonomy over governmental budget spending specifically for their needs, stressing a need to bolster local autonomy and foster balanced national growth.
In Lee’s latest move to place local autonomy as one of his top policy priorities, the liberal administration also suggested ways to increase state subsidies to local governments based on new rules to calculate them, to launch a pangovernmental team to ensure that goals of boosting local economies are being met and to hand out greater state incentives to regions farther from the capital.
In the first central-local partnership meeting since Lee’s inauguration in June, Lee vowed to triple the central government’s budget allocation to “local autonomous accounts” of each government, through which independent financial decisions based on specific needs are authorized. The “local autonomous accounts” hail from decentralization measures abiding by the Special Act on Local Autonomy and Decentralization and Balanced Regional Development.
“The central and local governments must become stronger and more equal partners in cooperation, to overcome the unipolar structure of South Korea’s economy led by Seoul and the surrounding metropolitan area, and to achieve balanced development through which no parts of the country are left behind in benefiting from equal opportunities for development,” Lee said.
The Lee administration floated an increase in the central budget allocation to 10.6 trillion won ($7.2 billion) for next year, which is currently under parliamentary review, compared to the 3.8 trillion won budget this year, Lee told governors and mayors of South Korean local governments at the presidential office.
Lee said the increase will prompt “a transfer of central governments’ tasks to local government, an improved financial control of the local government and the relocation of state-run institutions out of the Greater Seoul area.”
The meeting, followed by a luncheon at the former presidential compound of Cheong Wa Dae, came as rival parties gear up for upcoming local elections in June.
All 16 serving leaders of metropolitan cities and provinces were present at the meeting. Daegu was the exception, as its mayor post has remained vacant since conservative heavyweight Hong Joon-pyo stepped down to run for his party’s nomination for president in April.
Among the 16 leaders, 11 are conservative opposition figures while five are members of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, following a wave of People Power Party wins in 2022, months after then-President Yoon Suk Yeol’s inauguration.
Before meeting with the liberal president, local government leaders such as Oh Se-hoon, the Seoul mayor and an outspoken critic of the Lee administration, and Busan Mayor Park Heong-joon held talks with the People Power Party Chair Rep. Jang Dong-hyeok and Floor Leader Rep. Song Eon-seog at the party’s headquarters in western Seoul, near the National Assembly.
“If the law and local autonomy are shaken by political ploys, voters will bring judgment to (the ruling party)” Oh said, pointing to his recent conflict with Prime Minister Kim Min-seok over the construction of a high-rise commercial complex near the historical shrine Jongmyo in central Seoul.
This followed the Democratic Party’s two-day workshop with its regional committee chiefs that ended Tuesday. The party’s chair, Rep. Jung Chung-rae, told participants Monday that the victory in the June local election would be “crucial to the success of the Lee administration.”