Local bureaucrats quietly help favorite candidates in local vote

Loud speakers blared from atop trucks covered with pictures of candidates while campaign workers bowed busily as electioneering for the June 13 local elections began throughout the country.

While some voters may find the noise and fervor a minor nuisance, it weighs heavily on the public servants at the local government offices. The civil servants are paying subtle yet substantial attention to the election, often quietly aiding their favorite candidates.

When the city of Naju, South Jeolla province, conducted a survey of the municipal government employees, a whopping 95 percent said they were lining up behind a specific candidate. Many incumbents are even enlisting career civil servants to campaign on their behalf.

Secretaries working for the mayor of one city in North Chungcheong province say someone in the office may be leaking information to the mayor's main challenger. The challenger, a former mayor, shows up at every city function the mayor appears at, shaking hands with would-be voters. The secretaries suspect city employees who graduated from the same high school as the challenger are telling him where the mayor is going to be each day. A tense rivalry is building, the officials said, between local bureaucrats who are alumni of the challenger's high school and those who graduated from the same school as the mayor.

Some cases of this kind of silent campaign help have developed into lawsuits. A suit was filed May 26 against a grade-six civil servant in Hwansun county in South Jeolla province. The official was sued by the head of the county for libel. The official wrote on the county's Web site, "The county chief is shuffling county personnel based on loyalty and cash gifts." Local officials said the claim was made to hurt the county head in the campaign.

Election observers say the local officials try to manipulate the campaigns both in hopes of future promotion and out of fear of retribution. An official in Gangwon province who worked for an appointed mayor who was defeated in the first local elections in 1995 said he suffered because of his work with the ousted mayor. The incoming mayor made it known that holdovers from his predecessor would be transferred out of city hall. The official, who asked to remain anonymous, said he has bounced around from one low-level city agency to another for the past seven years.

A public official at a district office in Daejeon said, "One colleague who went around cutting down the incumbent district office head during the last election resigned after the incumbent was reelected. The official was transferred six times in a short period of time.

"We need to at least pretend that we are loyal to the likely winner in order not to face disadvantages later on."

In another ominous sign for the pledges of "clean elections" made by President Kim Dae-jung and just about every local candidate, an anonymous report has popped up on the Web site of Yeongi county in South Chungcheong province. The report claimed that a candidate for county chief extracted an "oath of loyalty" from some 15 county officials who gathered at a restaurant in Gongju on May 1.

The officials reportedly agreed to campaign for the incumbent.

"We are finding out that incumbent heads of local governments are using their authority to mobilize the heads of smaller administrative units to campaign for them," said Representative Shin Kyung-shik of the Grand National Party.

by Choi Sang-yeon