By Josh Smith
SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korea’s conservatives struggled on Wednesday to form a unity ticket to take on Democratic Party frontrunner Lee Jae-myung in a snap vote set for June 3, as courts spared him from facing sentencing in a criminal case before the vote.
The conservative People Power Party selected former labour minister Kim Moon-soo as its candidate earlier this month, but former prime minister Han Duck-soo stepped down as acting president and announced his entry into the presidential race last week.
The two candidates met on Wednesday but failed to come away with a compromise. Neither candidate is seen as having a shot against Lee unless the other drops out, and the registration deadline is looming on May 11.
Han said ahead of the meeting that he wouldn’t register for the presidential race if he couldn’t find agreement with Kim and the PPP.
Han reiterated his stance that he would follow the party’s decision on how to choose a united candidate, his spokesperson said after the meeting. Kim expressed regret that they could not make any progress.
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, welcomed a Seoul court’s decision to schedule its reconsideration of a criminal election law violation case against Lee for June 18, pushing a ruling that could determine his eligibility to run until after the election.
Yonhap news agency cited the court as saying it had postponed the hearing “in order to guarantee a fair electioneering opportunity to the defendant, who is a presidential candidate, and eliminate controversies about the fairness of the trial.”
Depending on the sentence handed down by the court for an election law violation that Lee was found guilty of, he could be barred from running for office for at least five years.
CONSERVATIVES IN DISARRAY
In comments to foreign media earlier on Wednesday, Han stressed that he always opposed ousted president Yoon Suk Yeol’s martial law decree.
The PPP is divided over whether to defend or condemn Yoon’s martial law, which was deemed unconstitutional by a top court.
The party is a long-shot to win against former opposition leader Lee.
“I was always against martial law,” Han told reporters, but decried more than 30 impeachments levied by the Lee-led opposition.
While Yoon cited those impeachments as among the factors justifying his decree, Han said martial law could never be the cure to such political ills.
Addressing Yoon’s claims of voting fraud, Han said the government had not found evidence to suspect elections had been compromised, but called for more efforts to investigate and reassure voters.
“Politics in Korea today is closer to violence than politics,” Han said, citing rampant fake news and intolerance for opposing views.
He reiterated his promise to enact constitutional reforms if elected, and sacrifice his own presidency by stepping down once the amendment is achieved in the third year of his term. Under the current constitution, the president serves for five years.
“I decided to run for office out of a sense of crisis that if politics does not change completely, the Republic of Korea, which our people have worked hard to build, may collapse,” Han said.
Election favourite Lee had nearly 50% voter support, according to a survey by the JoongAng Ilbo daily published on Tuesday. The survey put Kim on 33% if he became the candidate on a unity ticket, while Han was on 36%.
(Reporting by Josh Smith; Additional reporting by Jack Kim and Jihoon Lee; Editing by Michael Perry and Bernadette Baum)
