South Korean lawmaker Bae Hyun-jin was taken to hospital with a bleeding head on Thursday after a teenager allegedly hit her on the head with a rock. That writes the South Korean news agency Yonhap. According to her assistant, a male pedestrian in the capital Seoul walked up to her and asked: “Are you parliamentarian Bae Hyun-jin?” After an affirmative answer, she would have received a slap. According to the police, the arrested suspect is 15 years old.
The 40-year-old politician from the conservative South Korean coalition party People Power Party is doing well and is out of danger. She came away better than Lee Jae-myung (59), the opposition leader of the Democratic Party who was stabbed in the neck earlier this month. He had to stay in hospital for eight days. The perpetrator later said that he wanted to kill Lee to prevent him from becoming president.
There will be parliamentary elections in South Korea in April and the expectation is a neck-and-neck race between Bae’s conservative party and Lee’s liberal party. South Korean media attribute the recent attacks on politicians to the hardened political debate. Strong language is thus the beginning of a vicious circle in which outsiders come up with violent ideas and implement them, which in turn leads to even stronger language. “A time of madness,” a minister recently described the situation.