General Affairs Director of the Jo Guk Innovation Party, Lee Hae-min, holds a press conference [Seoul=Yonhap News]

The Jo Guk Innovation Party and Kim Yong-nam, a candidate for the National Assembly for Pyeongtaek-B in the Democratic Party of Korea, engaged in a verbal dispute on the 27th, one week before the June 3rd local elections.

With the candidate unification between the Innovation Party's Jo Guk and the Democratic Party's Kim Yong-nam in Pyeongtaek-B effectively off the table, both sides are escalating their attacks on each other in their pursuit of victory.

Lee Hae-min, General Affairs Director of the Innovation Party's Election Committee, held a press conference today, raising suspicions about Kim's operation of a lending company under a false name and urged the Democratic Party to "make a swift decision."

He stated, "In the Pyeongtaek-B region, as media outlets continuously raise issues about the candidate's qualifications, there is a growing concern that this distrust will spread to the entire progressive camp. This is because citizens are seeing in Candidate Kim the very image of a 'bad prosecutor' that they have called to step down from the public square."

Regarding the Democratic Party's response to calls for an ethical audit of Candidate Kim, stating to "maintain decorum," Lee said, "I am not sure when candidate verification began to be evaluated as crossing a line. The Innovation Party is speaking from a very common-sense, public perspective."

Candidate Kim Yong-nam starts his election campaign [Pyeongtaek=Yonhap News]

In response, Candidate Kim's campaign issued a statement today, criticizing, "For days, the Innovation Party has mobilized all of its lawmakers to inflate suspicions about Candidate Kim and spread false information. They have even uttered absurd remarks, demanding that our Democratic Party withdraw its candidate."

The statement continued, "It appears they have lost their reason and reached extreme levels of anxiety due to the reality that their election prospects are dim, no matter how hard they try. I urge them to consider the charges for which Jo Guk, the Innovation Party's candidate, was sentenced to imprisonment and served time."

The campaign added, "We urge them to carefully consider how terms such as college admissions fraud, sexual harassment, and infidelity, which are unpleasant to utter, are connected to their own party. Please take care of yourselves first."