By Kim Rahn
Twitter again proved its undeniable prowess in Monday’s primary where independent lawyer-turned-activist Park Won-soon was selected as the unified liberal candidate for the Seoul mayoral election.
Park’s victory underlined the mighty power of social network services (SNS) in elections, showing that it could become a stronger political tool to mobilize voters than traditional, organized political parties, analysts said.
Park scored 52.15 percent of the total marks in a three-stage assessment _ jury evaluation, opinion poll and direct vote, beating Park Young-sun of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) who had 45.5 percent.
Analysts said the independent candidate Park won a higher-than-expected score even in the direct poll that was originally forecast to be favorable to the DP member as more young voters, influenced by encouraging messages on Twitter, made an appearance.
In the vote, some 17,800 among 32,000 representatives who had applied in advance to vote participated, recording a fairly-high turnout of 60 percent. The DP’s Park won more direct votes but not enough to change the outcome.
“The number of voters topped 15,000. This means the activist Park’s supporters rushed to vote, apparently spurred by online encouragement,” a DP official said.
Once the polls opened at 7 a.m., buses taking DP members flooded Jangchung Gymnasium in central Seoul. Pressured by the DP’s organizational power, Park Won-soon’s aides encouraged bloggers and tweeters to vote, saying through his Twitter account, “The DP’s power to mobilize members is huge,” and “We are at a disadvantage. Please take part in the vote.”
The online messages worked. More and more people in their 20s and 30s came in the afternoon. Some celebrity tweeters, including Seoul National University professor Cho Kuk and novelist Gong Ji-young, posted photos of them voting on their Twitter accounts.
Cho, Gong and Kim Ou-joon, a journalist running progressive online journals and a radio program, encouraged eligible voters to cast their ballots, saying on their accounts that they would give their books as presents to those who post photos as evidence they went to the polling station.
Such encouragement brought more supporters of the activist than mobilized DP members.
Park Gyeong-cheol, a surgeon and celebrity economic critic who is close to Seoul National University professor Ahn Cheol-soo, a strong supporter of Park, said that SNS has destroyed the traditional media’s role as gatekeeper.
“Through SNS, ordinary citizens’ opinions are shared and they break the frames which traditional media have set. Not the media-defined public opinion but ‘real public opinion’ has become the mainstream,” Park said in a radio interview.
Call for new politics
Internet and SNS users said it was the result of political parties’ negligence of people’s actual needs and the consequent public doubt in them.
“This shows how people distrust existing political circle. The activist’s defeat of Park Young-sun, who the huge DP party gave all-out support, is a citizens’ revolution for political change,” one tweeter said.
A blogger, ganginhan, also said on a portal site, “This poll has created an important precedent that a political party’s organized power cannot beat citizens’ voluntary participation.”
Another blogger, harryapple, said, “The media generation has become the leader in politics. Now they have to have upright ideas and values.”