[Editorial] Selecting candidates

With the Lunar New Year holiday over, the ruling and opposition parties will have to speed up the arduous process of selecting parliamentary candidates soon. At the same time, they have to hasten the task of crafting campaign promises. They cannot afford to spend too long on these electoral preparations, with only two-and-a-half months until the April general elections.

Parties’ nomination principles are already laid out. Among them are what percentage of incumbent lawmakers will be denied nominations and how many of the 245 electoral districts the parties will reserve for women.

The ruling Grand National Party has promised that 25 percent of lawmakers elected in districts will be denied nominations. The main opposition Democratic United Party is also committed to replacing a sizable number of incumbent lawmakers with new faces, though the exact percentage has yet to be determined. Upon her election as the opposition party’s chairwoman earlier this month, Han Myeong-sook promised to make a drastic change in the nomination process in favor of new blood.

Both the ruling and opposition parties vow to raise the level of women’s representation in parliamentary politics. The ruling party has promised to reserve 74 electoral districts, or 30 percent of the total, for the nomination of women. But the opposition party is not as enthusiastic about empowering women in politics. It says women candidates will be nominated in more than 15 percent of the local electoral districts.

Four years ago, 14 women won elections in districts, and another 27 were picked through proportional representation. The combined number accounted for a mere 13.7 percent of the total of 299 seats.

Only a few voice opposition to the broad nomination principles now. But the devil will be found in the details, as few incumbents will accept with grace a decision by the screening committee to deny them nominations. If past experiences are any guide, almost all of them will claim fraud and raise hell, threatening to run, or actually running, in the elections as independents or members of rival parties.

As such, it will be necessary to set stringent criteria to ensure a transparent nomination process and select a figure deemed authoritative and unbiased to head the nomination committee. Former politicians with a fresh, untarnished image, politically active priests and university faculty members are mentioned as potential leaders or members of the ruling party’s screening committee.

But the opposition party has made no decision yet on whether it will invite a renowned outsider to chair its nomination committee or choose one of its members in leadership positions. Here again, it is necessary to ensure the nomination process will be transparent and impartial.

It will be easier than in the past for the two parties to keep the nomination process away from undue factional influence if they make good on their promise to open it up to people with no party membership.

More prone to a scandal than the nomination for constituency elections will be the selection of nominees for proportional representation. It has not been unusual for influential party members to be involved in money-for-nomination scandals in the past.

The ruling party is reportedly planning to establish a separate screening committee for proportional representation. But before making a final decision, it is urged to make clear why a separate committee is necessary when the task can be carried out by one single screening committee.

The ruling party needs to take extra care to avoid allegations of corruption. Isn’t it already paying a high price for a case involving Rep. Park Hee-tae, National Assembly speaker, who is accused of buying votes for his election as party chairman four years ago?

The scandal apparently pushed the party’s popularity down in the districts that elected its members to the National Assembly in the previous elections. It cannot afford another corruption case, given that its traditional supporters are disillusioned by the party’s lackluster performance. As the lawmakers witnessed during their holiday constituency work, they were turning their back on the ruling party.