A party that morphed into criminals’ haven

A new political party launched by former Justice Minister Cho Kuk shortly before the April 10 parliamentary elections is being crammed with criminals and suspects, as expected. Most of the makeshift party’s candidates for proportional representative seats, announced Monday, were ex-convicts or on trial over criminal charges. Election experts forecast that the party’s proportional candidates up to No. 10 will be elected lawmakers in the election if it continues at the current pace.

Cho, candidate No. 2 for the proportional seats of the novel party, was sentenced to two years in jail and given 6 million won ($4,500) in fines for bribery and power abuse charges by the Seoul High Court last month. Given the same verdicts in his first and second trials, the Supreme Court would not reverse the rulings by two lower courts. If the top court upholds the lower courts’ judgment, Cho must lose his seat.

Lawyer Shin Jang-sik — the party’s spokesperson and candidate No. 4 — was arrested for drunk driving and driving without a license repeatedly. In the 2020 election, he became the Justice Party’s proportional candidate No. 6, but dropped out of the race over the criminal records. Candidates with a history of drunk driving and driving without a license were disqualified from entering the nomination race for Justice Party, but such records didn’t matter for Cho’s party.

Rep. Hwang Un-ha, proportional candidate No. 8, was sentenced to three years in prison in his first trial last year for intervening in the Ulsan mayoral election to help then-President Moon Jae-in’s close friend get elected mayor. After the ruling, Hwang declared he would not run in this election, but he left the Democratic Party to join Cho’s party to seek another four-year term.

A former senior Justice Ministry official, No. 10 on the roster, was found not guilty of abusing his power to impose a travel ban on a former vice justice minister, but is currently undergoing his second trial. Another senior prosecutor at the ministry was dismissed from her job for conspiring to drive out then-prosecutor general Yoon Suk Yeol, but she ended up placing her name on the list. Could the party’s nominations of such controversial figures as candidates for proportional seats really match the cause of proportional representation to protect professional associations and minorities?

Such noise does not stop with Cho’s party. The governing People Power Party also canceled its nomination of a former government official over his receiving a golf favor just a day after the decision. The time has come for political parties to raise the transparency of nominating proportional candidates.