[Editorial] Candidate nomination

Political parties are rushing to speed up the process of nominating candidates for the April 13 general election as they face a tight schedule due to a long delay in fixing constituency boundaries.

The main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea has already announced the list of 10 incumbent lawmakers who will be denied nomination in the coming elections.

The party’s candidate screening committee, consisting of outside experts, has undertaken a thorough vetting of its 108 lawmakers to remove the bottom 20 percent from the candidate list.  

The blacklist included Rep. Moon Hee-sang, a five-term lawmaker who has often been tapped to lead the party when it was bogged down in crisis. It also included Rep. Lim Su-kyung, a former female student activist who made an unauthorized trip to North Korea in 1989.

The party is expected to weed out more incumbent lawmakers who are deemed unqualified. The screening committee is poised to conduct a second round of scrutiny, this time focusing on the bottom 50 percent of the party’s heavyweights who have served three or more parliamentary terms. Among the legislators in their first or second terms, the lower 30 percent will be put under the microscope.

The party is expected to eliminate a substantial number of sitting lawmakers from consideration for nomination, as it believes that nothing is more effective than a thorough reshuffle of candidates in demonstrating its resolve to recreate itself.

For this, the party has taken pains to recruit qualified new figures from outside. This strategy is well conceived, given that it has quite a few lawmakers who did harm to its image with their foul language and reckless behavior. If the party does not clear them out, voters may well do it.

The ruling Saenuri Party’s nomination management committee has also started to interview candidates. But the party’s leaders are still not on the same page over how to nominate candidates.

Rep. Lee Han-koo, head of the committee trusted by President Park Geun-hye, is in favor of boldly replacing incumbents with new faces a la Minjoo Party.

But the party’s chairman, Rep. Kim Moo-sung is not a big fan of such a scheme. In fact, he views it as a tradition of the past that needs to be abolished.

Kim is a strong advocate of open primaries where candidates are chosen by party members and citizens through a bottom-up process, rather than “top down” by a handful of nomination panel members.

One problem with this approach is that it is more advantageous to incumbents, who are generally better known than political novices.

Whichever approach they take, parties should select candidates based on their qualifications and eligibility. They should also ensure that their nomination processes are fair, transparent and objective. Otherwise, voters will shun their candidates. Parties should bear in mind that their election scorecards will depend much on how and whom they nominate as candidates.