By Chung Min-uck
The ruling Saenuri Party extended the registration deadline for candidates to run in the April 11 general election on the conservative party ticket Friday amid a slow response.
The poor showing is the combined results of the ruling party’s falling support rate after the hacking of the website of the election watchdog followed by the revelation of a vote-buying scandal and its lackluster reform drive.
The party’s candidate selection committee announced that it will receive applications for five more days until next Wednesday.
The ruling party was originally scheduled to stop accepting applications Friday.
Party spokesman Rep. Hwang Young-cheul told reporters over 630 people had put themselves forward to run on the Saenuri Party ticket as of Friday.
In the previous parliamentary election in 2008, the number of applicants expressing their intention to run for the Grand National Party (recently renamed the Saenuri Party) was 1,012.
Earlier, the party decided to choose 80 percent (196 parliamentary seats) of its electoral candidates through an open competition.
Meanwhile, the main opposition Democratic United Party (DUP) said 579 people applied to run as candidates on the second day of registration, Friday.
In the latest opinion poll conducted by Realmeter, the DUP's popularity was ahead of the Saenuri Party by 4 percentage points.
The conservative Saenuri Party has seen its support rate continue to dwindle even after the announcement of reform measures such as excluding 25 percent of incumbent lawmakers from selection for the upcoming general election and changing its name and logo.
The ruling party is also facing an uphill battle over so-called “strategic recruitment” outside the party.
Earlier it set a rule to strategically field 75 percent of proportional representative candidates, 39 seats in the National Assembly, and 20 percent of district candidates, 49 seats, in a top-down way.
Lee Moon-yul, a prominent novelist, reportedly rejected Saenuri overtures to run as a proportional representative candidate.
The party leadership’s offer to Kim Jong-hoon, a former trade minister, to run in the elections on the ruling party ticket caused a backlash among the party ranks.
Several members, including emergency committee member Lee Sang-don, are worried Kim’s association with the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement will prove extremely unpopular among farmers.
Kim was Korea’s chief negotiator of the accord.