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[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Hyemin] The April general election district delimitation plan was overturned in just one day. This happened as the ruling and opposition parties rejected the proposal from the District Delimitation Committee and presented new delimitation criteria. Accordingly, the Sejong City electoral district will increase to two districts, while the Gunpo City electoral district in Gyeonggi Province will be reduced to one, with the final district plan expected to be confirmed next week.

On the night of the 4th, Lee In-young of the Democratic Party, Shim Jae-cheol of the United Future Party, and Yoo Seong-yeop of the Minsaeng Party, all floor leaders, reached an agreement on the delimitation criteria after late-night consultations and conveyed this to the District Delimitation Committee. This was a dramatic agreement reached within a day without accepting the committee’s self-made proposal.

The reason the committee created its own proposal largely lies with the ruling and opposition parties. Despite repeated urging from the committee, the parties failed to agree on the delimitation criteria for nearly a month. Even after the committee proposed its own criteria, the parties ultimately declared the negotiations deadlocked and passed the responsibility back to the committee, citing the sharp conflicts of interest in each party’s constituencies as the reason for the difficulty in reaching an agreement.

The reason the parties rejected the committee’s proposal and reached an agreement within a day was that they judged the committee’s plan involved more drastic changes than expected. The committee had earlier submitted a delimitation plan to the National Assembly that divided four electoral districts?Sejong, Suncheon, Chuncheon, and Hwaseong?and merged four others. Following strong opposition from the regions targeted for mergers and the emergence of a so-called “giant electoral district” combining six cities and counties, public criticism intensified, accelerating the parties’ agreement process.

According to the parties’ decision, the final delimitation plan minimizes changes by splitting one Sejong electoral district and merging another. Chuncheon and Suncheon will not be divided. Instead, parts of the Suncheon and Chuncheon areas will be detached and added to other districts to meet the population upper limit. Although this violates current law, an exceptional supplementary clause will be introduced in the election law.

Considering that the re-delimitation will take about three days, the initial goal of passing the delimitation plan in the plenary session on the 5th was missed. Consequently, the deadline for preparing the overseas voter list on the 6th was also exceeded, and the plan is expected to be barely passed before the final confirmation deadline on the 16th.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.