President Park Geun-hye is apparently upping the ante in her hardball politics. The launch of a new anticorruption drive and the threat of legal action against local education offices over financing a free child care program are some of her latest gambits.

These moves follow Park’s bitter attacks on the National Assembly – including its speaker -- and political parties over the parliament’s failure to reach a compromise on key legislation. Park’s unilateral push for the revival of state-authored Korean history textbooks for middle and high school students had already struck a nerve with the nation.

All these show that, now in the fourth year of her presidency, Park does not intend to let up on her hardline stance and remain as dogmatic and high-handed as ever.

The first sign of this came through Finance Minister Choi Kyung-hwan, who warned Tuesday that the central government would take legal action against local education offices that had not allocated money for the free child care and preschool programs for youngsters aged 3-5, known as “Nuri.”

The issue pits the central government against local education authorities who should be responsible for the money, and their failure to reach a compromise has resulted in the program’s suspension in some cities and provinces.

Neither Park nor her aides sat together with the local education officials to resolve the issue, and the central government’s first action of the New Year was to threaten an “all-out” offensive against the education authorities.

Choi said that the government would ask the Board of Audit and Inspection and the state prosecution to launch a probe into the case and take all other available means -- legal, administrative and fiscal. It certainly looks like a declaration of war.

A stronger sign of Park’s hardball politics came from her own mouth on the same day. Presiding over the year’s first Cabinet meeting, Park solemnly announced that her government was setting out on a new anticorruption drive in officialdom.

The president said that “long standing evils” in the country stood in the way of vitalization of the economy and that this year, the government would have to exert unwavering efforts to root out structural, deep-rooted irregularities.

“I want each Cabinet ministry to further strive to eradicate corruption,” a stern Park said.    

There is nothing wrong -- rather it should be very much encouraged -- that our chief executive is so worried about corruption and determined to fight it.
But we cannot but worry that Park –as her predecessors did -- may use corruption-busting to maintain her grip on power as she heads into the penultimate year of her five-year presidency.

It is against this backdrop that the state prosecution’s plan to establish a special unit -- named the Special Corruption Investigation Office -- has drawn such a negative public response. The unit should not repeat the mistakes of the past, when a similar unit was often used as a governing tool of the president in power.