Floor Leaders Agree on Public Election Management

Agreeing on the basic principles for the election system reform and transparent political funding, each party is busy working on its own reform plan.

Floor leaders from the three major parties gathered on November 4 and set an agreement that the three parties would collaborate to form an advisory committee for political reform with experts in five fields including law, journalism, civic groups, and women issues to meet the public’s demand for swift political reform and to come up with a proper political reform bill.

Although floor leader Kim Geun-tae of the newly formed Uri Party, which is the ruling party in all but name, could not attend the meeting due to his tight schedule, he informed that he would abide by the agreement.

Floor leaders also reached a consensus on introducing the public election management system to deal with high-cost election structure as well as switching the current minor electorate system from medium to major electorate system. In addition to these, the floor leaders came to an agreement that the three parties would start discussing adopting systems to decentralize power, including yielding more power to the prime minister.

In the meantime, the Grand National Party started working on follow-up measures on its five principles of political reform based on the pledge of Chairman Choe Byung-yul that the party would not receive political payments from businesses.

Rep. Lee Jae-oh, Secretary-General and Chairman of the Emergency Committee of GNP said at the meeting, “We already canceled the supporters’ meeting in Seoul scheduled to be held today.” He added, “To show our willingness and consistency toward political reform, the party will cancel the supporters’ meetings in other regions, too.” Secretary-General Lee also said that although the supporter system is legal, there may be a loophole for dirty money. “This is why GNP has decided to abolish the current system and is considering alternatives,” he said.

Chairman Choe Byung-yul chimed with Rep. Lee at a press conference, “All parties reach an agreement on distributing political funds according to number of seats each party has after raising funds from business.” He said that to raise political funds, it would be the best to let large companies deposit 1 percent of their corporate taxes to the National Election Commission. “Then, there will be no problem even if we abolish the supporter system,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, the Millennium Democratic Party decided at a meeting to submit a political reform bill containing elimination of the district party chapter after the General Election next year, disclosing a list of major donators and creating 23 new women-only districts.

Uri Party is going to discuss how to reform the current election system and promote transparency of political funds through forming an ad-hoc committee for clean politics as well as coming up with code of conduct in line with the reform measures.

Chairman Kim Jong-pil of the United Liberal Democrats suggested detailed reform measures such as closing district chapter, depositing donations to NEC, and shifting to a public election management system.

Sung-Won Park Yeon-Wook Jung swpark@donga.com jyw11@donga.com