Democratic Party leader Kim Min-seok has proposed lowering the threshold for forming a parliamentary negotiating bloc in the National Assembly to 15 seats from the current 20, opening a push to unite South Korea's progressive camp. The plan seeks to turn cooperation with progressive parties into institutional change, but the Rebuilding Korea Party said it had never been consulted and demanded the bar be cut to 10 seats, leaving the Democratic Party's unity drive at odds with its would-be partners on day one.
Appearing on the party's online channel Minti 07 on the 16th, Kim said the progressive camp must build an alliance and laid out four proposals: easing the negotiating bloc requirement, adopting what he called a reasonable electoral system, introducing a presidential runoff and consolidating candidacies to improve competitiveness, according to political sources on the 17th. On the bloc threshold, he said the bar is now 20 seats and that progressive parties appear to see about 15 seats as realistic and acceptable as a starting point. The figure was offered as a practical benchmark for the change long sought by parties that fall short of bloc status, including the Progressive Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Basic Income Party and the Rebuilding Korea Party.
Kim also made the alliance push official at a supreme council meeting held at Daejeon City Hall the same day. He said the party would begin an all-out drive for broad unity and that Rep. Park Beom-kye, who heads the party's grand unity committee, was expected to begin reaching out to the three progressive parties and the Rebuilding Korea Party starting that day.
Kim's proposals go beyond the bloc threshold. He said he intends to take up electoral system reform, a presidential runoff and consolidating candidacies among progressive parties. He said he had met each of the parties and found a degree of shared ground, and that he planned to raise the discussion in earnest. That points to ambitions beyond institutional cooperation, extending to joint candidacies in elections.
The Rebuilding Korea Party, however, distanced itself, saying no prior consultation had taken place. In a formal statement the same day, the party said it had held no formal or informal contact with the Democratic Party leadership on political reform, alliance or merger. Kim Joon-hyung, the party's floor leader, said there had been no serious discussion with his party on either a merger or the latest proposals, adding that he hoped for a serious conversation.
Cho Kuk, who heads the party's policy research institute, pushed back more directly on the 15-seat figure. Writing on Facebook, he said the 20-seat standard for a negotiating bloc was introduced in 1973 by Park Chung-hee's dictatorship to squeeze the opposition and is a legacy of the Yushin era. Lowering it to 10 seats, he said, is not a favor or an act of grace from a large party toward smaller ones but a normalization that corrects a distorted parliamentary democracy.
Cho was particularly critical of the 15-seat benchmark, saying that presenting a figure with no discernible basis and dressing it up as a decision or a concession reflects a failure to understand the history of South Korean democracy. Normalizing the bloc standard, he said, is a matter of building momentum for reform and widening democratic diversity, and he stressed that it is a political reform task that must be achieved separately from any merger between the Rebuilding Korea Party and the Democratic Party.
The Rebuilding Korea Party went beyond arguing over numbers and pressed the Democratic Party for concrete steps. It called on the party to carry out the roundtable declaration agreed by progressive-leaning parties during the last presidential campaign, form a consultative body on political reform, convene a third roundtable meeting and present a specific timetable for talks. Actions, not words, are needed, the party said.
The Democratic Party said for now that it would keep the door to discussion open. Asked about the Rebuilding Korea Party's demand for a 10-seat threshold, chief spokesman Park Sung-joon said the forum for discussion had only just opened and that more such discussion would follow. With the gap between Kim's 15 seats and the Rebuilding Korea Party's 10 seats now in the open, how Park Beom-kye approaches each party and sets up a formal negotiating table is shaping up as the first test of the progressive alliance effort.
