SEOUL — South Korea’s presidential election next Tuesday is sure to wind up with conservatives leveling a flurry of heated charges, from fraud to the Chinese having influence on the leftist who’s favored to win.
Korean conservatives are signaling their strategy while fearful the transition to left-leaning rule from conservative will reverse the gains in Seoul’s relations with Washington in the three years before the impeachment and ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol last month.
A former conservative prime minister, Hwang Kyo-ahn, predicted the leftist candidate, Lee Jae-myung, whom polls show well ahead of the conservative Kim Moon-soo, will live up to his record as an activist who’s accused American “occupying forces” of colluding with “pro-Japanese forces.”
Now Mr. Hwang, who served as acting president for six months after the 2017 impeachment and ouster of another conservative president, Park Geun-hye, says leftists led by Mr. Lee “want to communize our country” while “denying election fraud.” These “are the forces we need to fight against,” he said.
Mr. Lee spoke at a forum at which members of an “international election observation group” called for close monitoring of Tuesday’s election, looking especially for signs of election machines being hacked into and distortion of the vote counts.
A retired American Marine officer, Grant Newsham, said the Chinese and North Koreans had hacked into machines operated by the National Election Commission, most recently in elections in 2024 that gave Mr. Lee’s Minju, or Democratic Party, control of the national assembly.
The goal of Communist China, Mr. Newsham said, is “to take over South Korea through the national assembly” by making it “impossible to govern.” The Chinese, he said, “are able to break every system on earth.”
It was after the Minju-dominated assembly had blocked virtually all of Mr. Yoon’s legislative agenda that he attempted to impose martial law on December 3, setting off the chain of events that led to the assembly voting to impeach him. Mr. Yoon is now on trial for “insurrection,” and his former defense minister along with about 20 armed forces and police officers face an array of charges.
The Minju, confident of assuming control of the levers of power, also is intent on bringing charges against two of the men who served as “acting president” after Mr. Yoon’s impeachment. A former economics minister and ambassador to Washington, Han Duck-soo, and another former economics minister, Choi Sang-mok, were interrogated for 12 hours and barred from leaving the country — a possible prelude to charges being brought against them as well.
Mr. Yoon, while president, made clear that the system operated by the election commission is “vulnerable,” the observation team charged. “Electronic counting and early voting are the main reason for election fraud,” the team said. “No matter what election fraud and impeachment fraud,” it said, “no matter [how] anti-U.S., pro-China, pro-North Korea threaten us, we will never surrender.”
The outrage of these and similar comments reflected the deep divisions in Korean society between leftists and rightists. “I am deeply concerned that polarization is getting worse all the time,” the research director for Gallup Korea, Heo jin-jae, said. Mr. Heo said public opinion “has shifted to conservatives” over the past week or so after the conservative Mr. Kim appeared to have been closing the gap.
“During the Yoon presidency, his approval rating was less than 30 percent,” Mr. Heo said. “If the conservative People Power Party had chosen a younger candidate, then they could have made a charge.” Mr. Kim is 73.
Mr. Heo, who has been running Gallup Korea polls for more than 30 years, said he doubted vote fraud would be a major factor. “There has been a long history relating to election fraud,” he said in response to my question at a press conference at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club. “Whenever one candidate loses, he always argues there is election fraud,” he said. “However, no one has yet proved election fraud.”
Conservatives, though, believe Gallup leans left in such judgements, and see the problem with the return to leftist rule as far more serious.
Mr. Lee “has been very clear,” a well-known hardline conservative commentator, Gordon Chang, tells the Sun. “He’s very close to China. He’s going to distance himself from the U.S. He speaks about the U.S. in the most derogatory terms. I could see things going very badly.”
