AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
SEOUL
South Korea’s beleaguered ruling party revised its charter Thursday to clear the way for leading presidential hopeful and top female politician Park Geun-Hye to take charge as interim leader.
The move came a week after Grand National Party (GNP) head Hong Joon-Pyo quit his post in the face of dwindling support for the party ahead of legislative polls in April and a December 2012 presidential vote.
The resignation threw the conservative party into chaos, with many GNP members calling for a shake-up.
The previous charter banned prospective presidential candidates from leading the party. But the GNP, at Thursday’s caucus, revised it to help Park take the helm.
Park has not yet officially announced she will be standing for president, but if elected would be the country’s first female leader.
The daughter of former autocratic leader Park Chung-Hee, who was assassinated in 1979, she played a crucial role in a series of elections in 2004 and 2006.
But she had stayed away from party affairs since Lee Myung-Bak narrowly defeated her in a 2007 GNP presidential primary.
“The most important thing now is how to regain public confidence,” said Park, who has agreed with reformist GNP members to change the party’s structure and nomination process.
She also promised to consider changing the name of the party, which suffered a stunning defeat to an opposition-backed independent in an October vote for mayor of Seoul.
Its approval ratings fell further after an aide to a top GNP lawmaker was arrested this month on charges of trying to tamper with the result of the Seoul mayoral vote through a cyber-attack on the election commission.
An opinion poll published last week showed that 24.8 percent of voters would back the GNP while 30.5 percent would support a unified opposition candidate. Others were undecided.
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