Remove the unqualified from nominations

Some of the candidates running in the April 10 parliamentary elections are outlandish. Their ethical standards and sense of justice fall far off the norm. If they had been thoroughly screened, many of them hardly could have qualified even for district assembly.

Topping the oddity list is Democratic Party (DP) candidate Yang Moon-seok bidding for a district in Ansan, Gyeonggi. In April 2021, he took out a business loan of 1.1 billion won ($814,815) from a Korea Federation of Community Credit Cooperative (KFCC) outlet in Daegu under the name of his college student daughter feigning an operator of an internet shopping mall and used the money reportedly to buy an apartment in a posh neighborhood in southern Seoul.

Yang’s daughter reported to the lender that she spent 600 million won repaying lower-tier lenders and 500 million won purchasing merchandise for her shopping mall. The cooperative headquarters has launched an investigation into her case to determine the validity of her report. Yang claimed that the bank had first proposed the strange loan. The matter should be clarified before the election day.

Park Eun-jeong, the No. 1 proportional representative candidate of a party led by former Justice Minister Cho Kuk, denied any form of favoritism behind 4 billion won her husband earned in the first year after he left the prosecution as a senior prosecutor. If her husband really exploited his connections and prosecutorial credentials, he could have earned 16 billion won, not 4 billion won, she blatantly argued. Cho, who launched a party despite multiple criminal charges against him, unsurprisingly defended the couple.

Kim Jun-hyuk, a DP candidate running in a district in Suwon, implied that former president Park Chung Hee might have exploited young Korean girls taken as military sex slaves during the Japanese colonial rule.

Ihn Yo-han, campaign manager of the governing People Power Party (PPP), defended first lady Kim Keon-hee, saying even mafia groups do not touch children and wives. When President Yoon Suk Yeol caused an uproar by finding the price tag of 875 won for a bunch of green onions a “fair price,” Lee Soo-jung, a PPP candidate in Suwon, made a hideous defense, saying the president was referring to the price of one green onion root.

No campaign has seen so many nomination cancellations of candidates as this election. The frequent replacements suggest screening of the candidates was that sloppy. The habit of hasty recruitment is getting worse. Every addition of inept and unworthy candidate in the legislature sickens democracy. We need a systematic reform to examine candidates thoroughly and transparently from the nomination process.