KOREA: Lawsuits fly in Presidential race
Updated
In South Korea, primaries for the Presidential race have turned into all-out political war. The major rivals to lead the Grand National Party into the December election are Park Geun-hye, daughter of South Korea's former dictator Park Chung-hee, and Seoul's former mayor, the popular Lee Myung-bak. They've been trading insults and lawsuits. However the mudslinging may damage both their chances when the GNP chooses a final candidate next month.
Presenter: Bill Bainbridge
Speakers: Chris Gelken, senior associate editor of the Korea Herald newspaper
BAINBRIDGE: The race to be the next president of South Korea is well and truly under way with frontrunning candidates like Park Geun-hye launching a high profile campaign to celebrate her life and achievements. Opinion polls are showing the ruling block to be dead in the water and so the race to lead the conservative opposition, the Grand National Party or GNP, is being seen as a defacto race for president. Park Geun-hye is the major challenger to leading GNP candidate former Seoul mayor Lee Myung-bak. As the race hots up Chris Gelken, Korea Herald's senior associate editor says it's turning increasingly nasty.
GELKEN: Over the past several months officials working for both of these candidates have been levelling accusations of wrongdoing and even corruption against their opponents. And this has caused quite a lot of worries for the opposition GNP because they're seriously concerned of a split in the vote because if either one of these two candidates does not win the nomination there's the possibility that they may run as an independent.
BAINBRIDGE: And so is it possible that this could actually result in a complete split of the party, the party breaking up?
GELKEN: There have been concerns over the past couple of weeks with senior party officials saying that the conflict between these two candidates could split the party down the middle, which would be a disaster in this presidential election year.
BAINBRIDGE: The latest volley in the exchange of fire has seen Lee's brother and brother-in-law launch legal action claiming aides of Park Geun-hye have damaged their reputations by raising suspicions about dishonest financial activities by Lee and his family members. That in turn has lead state prosecutors to launch a probe into Lee's real estate dealings.
Now the party has stepped in, with GNP leader Kang Jae-sup pressing Lee`s camp to withdraw the lawsuits, and saying prosecutors should halt investigations as soon as the civil complaints have been dropped.
The conflict has now put Lee in a political bind, if he withdraws the suit he runs the risk of looking guilty but if he proceeds he keeps the suspicions in the headlines.
Professor Kang Won-taek from Soong sil University's Politics Department says those headlines have been helping his rival.
KANG: He is enjoying around 35 or 40 per cent of approval rate, Park Geun-hye has around 25 to 30 per cent. So still there is some gap between them. But the problem is his approval rate is declining, by contrast Park's popularity is slowly gaining. So the gap is decreasing now. So the problem is the this tendency is going on then it is not clear who's going to win ultimately.
BAINBRIDGE: Chris Gelken says while Lee is wearing the heat at the moment he is not the only one facing allegations.
GELKEN: There are allegations of certain improprieties against Park Geun-hye, now these are floating out there, people say they have evidence of wrongdoing against them but they haven't published it yet. So the local vernacular newspapers are essentially hanging on virtually every word uttered by spokespeople for the two camps to get some clue of what the next allegation is likely to be.
BAINBRIDGE: The Presidential primaries are due for August with the national elections set for December and all the infighting could see both Lee and Park damage their chances of being Korea's next President.
GELKEN: Most political pundits think that this mud-flinging between the two could actually damage the ratings of both of the candidates. There has been, you couldn't describe it as significant, but there has been a marginal swing back in favour of some of the potential liberal candidates if you were so, the general concern is that if this mud-flinging continues the popularity of both of these front-running candidates could take a significant decline.
