[Editorial] Party leadership races　

Leadership races at the ruling Saenuri Party and main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea are in full swing. But their campaigning, which could have helped invigorate each party, is highly likely to turn out to be a mediocre event.

Saenuri’s five candidates have begun a joint stump tour of the country, which will end in Seoul on Saturday, three days before the party elects its new leader at a national convention.

At the Minjoo Party, four candidates have thrown their hats into the ring, and one of them will be eliminated in a preliminary vote Friday before three remaining candidates are put to the final vote on Aug. 27.

For both Saenuri and Minjoo, the leadership races are important because the new leaders are to steer their respective parties through the nomination process and campaign for the 2017 December presidential election.

Moreover, both parties have gone through severe internal feuds, which led to the ruling party suffering its most devastating defeat in recent years at the April election and which resulted in the breakup of the main opposition party.

The new leaders need to heal wounds and reuinite their parties and traditional supporters -- both conservatives and liberal. 

Sadly, none of the candidates have been presenting the competence and vision required to fulfill such a mission.

The Saenuri candidates are still locked in fights over the past. The three candidates who belong to the mainstream faction loyal to President Park Geun-hye are focused on defending the group from accusations that its intervention in the candidate nomination process caused the party’s humiliating defeat at the April 13 parliamentary election.

The other two candidates also lack a vision to unite the strife-plagued party and make it a prime force for conservatives to retain power in the presidential election.

Minjoo candidates are hardly better than the Saenuri candidates. They are also buried in the past and are not offering a vision as to how they will lead the party, whose mission is to restore a liberal government after 10 years of conservative rule.

Some candidates -- such as Choo Mi-ae -- are digging up the past by bringing up the issue of alleged interference in the presidential election in 2012 by state intelligence agencies.

Another candidate, Song Young-gil even proposed that the vote count for the 2017 presidential election be conducted manually to prevent fraud.

These politicians, with such an anachronistic view, only talk about how hard-hitting they are – especially against the Park government and her policies such as the planned deployment of an advanced U.S. missile shield system here.

It is not wrong to say that there are no star players and no outstanding runners in either the Saenuri or Minjoo parties.

The lack of any excitement or expectation about the parties’ elections might be a barometer of where the two parties stand and where they are headed.