The Democratic United Party presidential hopefuls may have to go through as many as four rounds of preliminaries to win the candidacy, including a final vote between the two top candidates.

According to the rules submitted to the party’s administration committee on Wednesday, the party will survey party members and the public to select candidates for the preliminaries.

Seven DUP politicians ― Moon Jae-in, Sohn Hak-kyu, Chung Se-kyun, Kim Yong-hwan, Cho Kyung-tae, Kim Doo-kwan and Park Jun-yeong ― are competing, and the five with the most support will go through to the preliminaries.

The surveys will be conducted on July 29 and 30, and will ask 2,400 party members and an equal number of the public.

The preliminaries will then be held at selected locations across the country between Aug. 25 and Sept. 16. The preliminaries will begin in Jeju and finish in Seoul, and the ballots can be cast at polling stations, through mobile and online sites and at the rally venues.

However, if the winner does not have more than 50 percent of the vote, the winner of the preliminaries and the runner up will go through a deciding vote from Sept. 17 through to 23.

Although some of the DUP heavyweights had been calling for the introduction of the final vote, the plans were only finalized after Moon, who is considered to be the favorite, agreed to the plans on Tuesday.

However, once the preliminaries are over, the DUP candidate will likely have to compete against other candidates with progressive affiliations as the opposition parties are likely to form a united front in this year’s presidential election.

Unified Progressive Party leader Kang Ki-gap has already stated that his party will begin the process of selecting a unified candidate after the party’s candidate is selected in September.

In addition, if Seoul National University Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology dean Ahn Cheol-soo decides to run for the presidency, the DUP is unlikely to avoid joining forces with the academic.

While the rules for the preliminaries were welcomed by the heavyweights hoping to win the candidacy, some of the lesser known contenders expressed dismay.

After it was made known that Moon had agreed to the final vote, Cho criticized the plans, saying that they will lead to “astronomic costs” and that “the dynamism and tension of the preliminaries will drop sharply,” through his Twitter account.

Kim Yong-hwan also criticized the plans.

“People who have served as the party leader and the strong presidential candidate cooperated to change the rules in their favor,” Kim said on his Twitter account.

“(Candidates who agreed to the rules) should not criticize the tyranny of large corporations.”

Those with better standing in the party, however, welcomed the rules and Moon’s agreeing to the final vote.

“The final vote is a tool for strengthening the DUP candidate’s competitiveness and for stopping the second Lee Myung-bak administration and the second Yushin administration,” Kim Doo-kwan tweeted on Wednesday.

“Yushin” is a word meaning “reform” used by the Park Chung-hee administration in reference to itself during the 1970s.

By Choi He-suk (cheesuk@heraldcorp.com)