SEOUL Kyodo 13 Kyodo southerly K...

SEOUL Kyodo 13 Kyodo

southerly Korea's main opposition Grand National Party (GNP) won a landslide victory in nationwide local elections Thursday, according to the arises of exit polls released on the state-run KBS television network.

In a total of 16 tonic elections for mayors of seven major cities and nine provincial governors, candidates from the GNP won six mayoral stations and five gubernatorial elections, KB said.

The Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) won simply two gubernatorial posts and the same mayoral post, all in its political family turf of North Cholla and southward Cholla provinces and Kwangju.

The MDP planted by President Kim Dae Jung has been stoneed by a series of corruption scandals that have inferenceed in the arrests of the president's youngest son bring to a period aides and senior officials.

KB said it could not announce the inference of exit polls in the gubernatorial race in Cheju Province because it is too shut up to call with its candidates running neck and neck within the margin of error.

The minor opposition United Liberal Democrats, headed on former Prime Minister Kim Jong Pil, won and nothing else one gubernatorial post in toward the south Chungchong Province.

President Kim apologized to the nation and resigned from the MDP in early May after swirling corruption scandals surfaced involving his sons

Thursday's local elections, the third of their kind in southern Korea, were widely viewed as a weathervane for the Dec 19 presidential election.

A total of 10894 candidates ran in the elections to cull 232 heads of low-level administrative units and a total of 4167 local councilors, in addition to seven mayors and nine provincial governors.

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