Four-term former lawmaker Yoo Seong-min plans to announce his entry into the presidential race as an independent or a third-party candidate, sources close to him said Monday.
Yoo has decided to do so after discussing election-related strategies with his close affiliates following his announcement to not run in the ruling party’s primaries for the upcoming election, the previous days, according to sources close to the politician, who declined to be named. Yoo told his close aides that he plans to make decisions from now on “on a clean slate,” the sources added.
The former member of the conservative People Power Party declared Sunday not to enter the party's primaries scheduled for May 3, citing his frustrations with the ruling party’s unwillingness to change for the better despite having suffered the impeachments of two conservative presidents.
"The party has refused to take the path of proper self-reflection and change, even though conservative presidents have been impeached consecutively," Yoo wrote in a Facebook post uploaded Sunday. Former President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was recently removed from office by the Constitutional Court for violating the law and democratic principles with his Dec. 3 martial law declaration and ex-President Park Geun-hye, who was ousted in 2017 for bribery and coercion, were both conservative leaders.
Yoo is a long-time critic of the country’s largest conservative party here -- even though he was also a member of it -- often pointing out that it fails to uphold the spirit of true conservatism.
Yoo entered politics in 2000 and took on key roles within the Grand National Party, a predecessor of the People Power Party. He was first elected as a lawmaker in 2004 as a Grand National Party candidate. Due to conflict with the pro-Park faction within the party's later iteration, the conservative Saenuri party, throughout 2016, he launched his own minor center-right Bareun Party in early 2017. He finished fourth in the 2017 presidential election as the Bareun Party candidate.
Yoo later led the minor conservative Bareunmirae Party after launching it in 2018.
In 2020, the Bareunmirae Party merged with the minor center-right People Party, and that party was absorbed into the People Power Party in 2022.
mkjung@heraldcorp.com
