aespa’s Karina wears red, netizens & right-wing party claims it’s support, and now it’s a whole thing

For those who understandably haven’t been following along, South Korea is holding elections for a new President soon after the previous one was impeached and removed over his attempted coup. Both sides are thus campaigning, and recently aespa’s Karina has gotten involved through an Instagram post.

So basically, she wore the outfit above, which has red and the number two on it, both of which are associated with the right-wing People Power Party. The post also had a rose in it, and this election is being called the Rose Election, thus netizens immediately accused her of taking a political stance.

After the backlash, Karina deleted the post, but things flared up again when PPP spokespereson Baek Ji Won posted aespa to her Instagram Story with the song “Supernova” playing,

On one hand, the color, the number, and the rose make for either an unfortunate amount of coincidences and a lack of awareness or is an insane public political declaration on her part consider their fandom demo. On the other hand, an increasingly desperate PPP that has been trailing and fractured of late would gladly take any positive buzz, and this wouldn’t be even close to the first time a misunderstanding like this happened over vague things. Guessing this might require a clarification soon, though it’ll likely be default stance of being apolitical so people will believe what they want. And that could end up being a problem for aespa.

Also, sorry for not being active of late but everybody needs a break from time to time and this spell in K-pop seems like an ideal one, honestly, lol.