As the two leading candidates make their final bids in the neck-and-neck presidential race, negative campaigning is now rearing its ugly head. These days, the Internet and social networking services have been covered with a variety of false propaganda, personal attacks and slander raising groundless speculations against both of them.
One baseless story concerns the ruling party candidate Park Geun-hye which claims she has a child born out-of-wedlock who will soon be publicly identified. Another false rumor, started by a lawmaker of the main opposition Democratic United Party (DUP), claimed Tuesday that Park cheated during the second television debate the night before by using an iPad in violation of a relevant election law.
A smear story directed at Moon Jae-in, the DUP’s lawyer-turned-candidate, raised suspicions that his father served as a North Korean soldier but the truth is that Moon’s family in North Korea crossed the border to the South during the Korean War. Another rumor has it that Moon filled 80 percent of Cheong Wa Dae staffers with pro-North Korea activists while serving as chief of staff for late President Roh Moo-hyun.
Slanderous remarks targeting Ahn Cheol-soo, who quit the race after declaring his support for the main opposition contender, are even more severe. During his speech supporting the governing party contender on Wednesday, an actor described Ahn, the software mogul-turned-politician, as a ``treacherous subject’’ and told the audience that he should be dead.
The rival election campaigns also faced off over an allegation that the National Intelligence Service (NIS) has posted slanderous comments about Moon on the Internet through tens of agents in a bid to influence the presidential poll. On Tuesday, the DUP sent its officials, accompanied by police officers and National Election Commission (NEC) officials, to a small apartment in southern Seoul that they claimed was being used by a female NIS agent to post malignant comments about Moon online.
The agent, surnamed Kim, refused to let them in despite their request to examine her computer. She denied the allegation and submitted her computer to the police. It remains to be seen whether the spy agency has conducted operations to help Park’s campaigning and if the allegation turns out to be true, it will become a highly explosive issue in the run-up to the Wednesday election.
Given that things associated with the incident are simple, the truth will emerge soon. The DUP, however, showed typical dirty politics by tracking down the agent and repeating unsubstantiated arguments without presenting any hard evidence. Worse yet, the opposition party put a tail on the agent for a week and triggered a car accident on purpose to find out where she lives.
It’s possible for the rival camps to raise suspicions to a certain extent, considering that the race is too close to call with only a few days remaining. But what we are seeing now is quite disappointing, given that the ruling and opposition parties, surprised by the emergence of Ahn, scrambled to make pledges for new politics until recently.
It’s also disappointing to see the two leading runners engage in mudslinging in person with earnest debates on policies getting lost in between.
The election watchdog should do its utmost to find the truth about suspicions being raised as quickly as possible so that they can’t affect the outcome of the poll. Even now, the rival camps must restore calm and exercise self-restraint. Ultimately, it will be voters who can make a final judgment on those who rely on these outmoded negative campaigns.