Don’t let players decide the rules of the game

It would be disastrous if our election system is determined by the head of the majority party without any deliberation.

Majority Democratic Party (DP) leader Lee Jae-myung has made it official. With regard to the way to elect proportional representatives in the April 10 parliamentary elections, he said he would stick with the current system of assigning 47 seats out of the 300 seats in the National Assembly. Lee also plans to create satellite parties just as the party did in the last election four years ago.

Lee reversed his presidential campaign promise to ban the creation of satellite parties to win more seats. After the about-turn, the nationwide elections will most likely be held without correcting many loopholes in the weird proportional representation system.

The representation system was proposed by both the DP and minor opposition parties shortly before the last parliamentary election in 2020. They pushed for the novel election system “to strengthen the representation and proportionality of election.” But actually, the DP colluded with minor oppositions to pass the controversial act aimed at depriving the prosecution of its investigative authority. In the process, the Liberty Korea Party, now the governing PPP, was excluded from the discussion. That’s not all. Calculating the number of proportional seats for each party became extremely complex. In particular, a myriad of satellite parties emerged to aim for proportional seats, as the system was designed to give fewer seats to a party if it won more seats in constituencies. That led to the election of unqualified people as lawmakers.

The same farce will certainly be played out this time, too. Former Justice Minister Cho Kuk and former DP leader Song Young-gil — both under indictments for corruption — can be elected as legislators if they manage to create a satellite party to the DP. If this is not political collusion, what is?

It would be disastrous if our election system is determined by the head of the majority party without any deliberation. The DP says it went through a consensus-building process, but the party dithered over what representation system is better. In the face of strong resistance against a return to the previous proportional representation based on assigning the seats according to the number of seats in constituencies, the party leadership decided to allow the party leader to determine the system. This is not democracy.

Sadly, constituencies have not been fixed yet. If this confusion continues, voters’ rights to know will be seriously infringed and the controversy over the quality of candidates for proportional representatives will only deepen. This problem will be repeated over and over. You must not allow the players to decide the rule of their game. It will be even better to entrust an independent body with the job.