The country’s main political parties on Thursday agreed to create a parliamentary panel to restructure electorates throughout the country, following a Constitutional Court ruling that said population discrepancies among some electorates were too high.
The nation’s highest court last October ruled that some constituencies were underrepresented at the legislature. Those with populations one-third the size of larger voting districts are granted the same number of lawmakers. Justices said the population gaps were unconstitutional.
Leaders of the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy and the governing Saenuri Party agreed to create a parliamentary committee sometime next month to discuss how to reduce population differences among voting districts.
But parties agreed to give an external organization the final say over remapping the nation’s 246 parliamentary constituencies. Some say that this organization will be the National Election Commission, a government-run body unaffiliated with any party and in charge of managing South Korea’s major elections.
The decision to give an outside body overall authority appears to be aimed at calming public fear that the country’s main parties would remap districts in their own favor, to protect their interests before the 2016 general elections.
The two parties hold a combined 288 seats in the 295-seat parliament.
Party representatives, though, failed to form a panel to consider amendments to the Constitution.
Proposals to limit the president’s constitutional powers over domestic affairs such as Cabinet and Constitutional Court appointments have been raised since the 1970s. The opposition and some Saenuri lawmakers have reignited public debate over the issue.
Main opposition officials say the president’s powers over Cabinet nominations give the chief executive overreaching political influence over governing party lawmakers, who often seek positions in the government’s top decision-making body to boost their political careers.
Supporters of constitutional reform suggest strengthening the prime minister’s authority over domestic affairs. They also support electing the prime minister by parliamentary vote, as opposed to giving the president the right to pick a person for the government’s No. 2 job.
Leaders of President Park Geun-hye’s Saenuri Party have been treading carefully though, after the president expressed her staunch opposition to rewriting the Constitution during her New Year Address Monday.
The president and influential members of the governing party say such a parliamentary panel would only increase partisan wrangling, impeding key legislative reforms the Park administration is pursuing.
These include possible changes to pensions for retired civil servants in order to lower the public debt, and deregulating the labor market, a move targeting the 9 percent youth jobless rate.
“The NPAD strongly demanded forming a panel (to revise the Constitution) but the governing party proposed postponing such debates to a later date,” NPAD spokesman Kim Sung-soo said, adding that was all he had been told by the senior party leadership.
“Parties were in consensus over the panel for electoral reforms, but there appear to be great differences over constitutional amendments.”
By Jeong Hunny ()
koreaherald@heraldcorp.com
