Former GNP leader Park Geun-hye went to Daegu after criticizing the party’s nomination process and said former GNP lawmakers who remain loyal to her should be allowed to rejoin the party if they win seats in the National Assembly after running as independents. She made the comments during an interview with a regional daily as soon as she arrived there, so she must be determined to see this happen.

The GNP’s stance is that it is impossible for defectors to rejoin, according to the party’s Secretary General Lee Bang-ho. He said it was wrong to take back someone who was eliminated from the GNP’s nomination list due to problems simply because he or she then got elected to the National Assembly. Leaving the possibility open would be like insulting existing GNP candidates, he added.

Park, who must be clearly aware of the GNP’s stance, claims that her followers who left the party and are running as independents should be allowed back because they were unfairly forced to leave. She did not forget to laud the defectors once again for playing leading roles in the change of the country’s leadership and wished them the best of luck. In other words, she wants to make sure followers now running outside of the GNP will defeat the conservative party’s candidates.

Park is poised to take this stance throughout the general election campaign. The situation has grown from bad to worse, but the GNP’s leadership has yet to announce a single remedy. There was talk of the president’s older brother and a key GNP official giving up their bid for another term in the National Assembly. But they decided to do the opposite in just one day. It turns out that plans to win back voter support were all part of a strategy to gain the upper hand in the internal battle. It would have been better if not even the notion of such a plan had surfaced.

In a survey by one daily newspaper a month ago, 59.1 percent of respondents forecast the GNP will capture a majority of seats in the National Assembly. But now, only 39.5 percent of respondents feel this way. That’s a 20 percentage point drop. And 54 percent of respondents feel the GNP’s nomination process was wrong, compared to just 27 percent saying it was right.

The United Democratic Party has nothing to cheer about either. Surveys show 37 percent of respondents feel the UDP’s nomination process was wrong, compared to 32 percent saying it was satisfactory. Everybody knows the UDP’s so-called reforms in its nomination process fizzled in the end and were reluctantly followed by party members only because of the tenacity of Park Jae-seung, the head of the party’s screening committee.

It is the voters who will end up losing. In the past, all they had to do was to choose candidates from different parties and base their judgments on their character. But now, voters will have to look closely and determine which high-ranking party member they are aligned with.