The ruling Saenuri Party failed Friday to find a compromise in an escalating dispute over how to pick its presidential candidate as differences between party leaders and minor hopefuls were too wide, an official said.

At the center of the row is a demand from three contenders ― Gyeonggi Province Gov. Kim Moon-soo and Reps. Chung Mong-joon and Lee Jae-oh ― that the party fully open its primary voting to non-party members in what is dubbed an “open primary” system. 

They claim the current rules favor former party chief Park Geun-hye and that, without changing them, they stand little chance of beating the long-time favorite to win the party’s ticket for December’s presidential election.

The three have threatened to boycot the race unless the rules are changed.

Party leaders, considered close to Park, however, are opposed to the demand.

On Friday, party chief Hwang Woo-yea and secretary general Suh Byung-soo held a meeting with representatives of the three candidates, but the two and a half hours of talks yielded no agreement, Suh said.

Aides to the three candidates demanded the party set up an independent committee of neutral officials to discuss the issue.

Suh said he told the three sides it was difficult to accept that demand. Party leaders want to put such a committee under official party organs.

Under the current rules, the party’s presidential candidate is determined by combination of votes, roughly half from party members and the other half from ordinary citizens. Minor contenders have called for determining the winner based entirely on votes from ordinary citizens.

“We have to hold the primary in a way that is great, productive and helpful to the people ... so that we can show the people that we are a party the people can rely on at a time when the nation is in difficulty and hardship,” Hwang said at the start of the meeting.

Meanwhile, Saenuri is separately struggling to contain fallout from the leak of its membership list, after a ranking party official has been detained on charges of selling the ruling party’s membership list to a private communications company for unknown reasons.

The detained official, revealed only as Lee and who was working as an expert adviser for the ruling party, is accused of selling the list of 2.2 million party members to an unidentified text message service company between January and March this year in return for 4 million won ($3,570), according to prosecutors at the Suwon District Prosecutors’ Office in Suwon, south of Seoul.

Suh told reporters that the party has launched an internal inspection into the leak incident, noting that Lee had no authority to gain access to a computer server containing the membership list at that time of his crime.

“(Separately from prosecutors’ investigation), an internal inspection team will look into the suspicious circumstances surrounding the information leak. After that, the party will come up with countermeasures,” Suh said. 

(Yonhap News)