By Park Song-wu
Staff Reporter

Thursday’s elections are set to be a very close competition between the Uri Party and the opposition Grand National Party (GNP), with the latter seeing a final-stage rise in approval ratings and engaging in a neck-and-neck race in 50 key battle fields against the pro-government party.

The two parties made last-ditch efforts to attract swing voters on Tuesday, a day before the 13-day official campaigning period ends, calculating how many votes they will earn in the crucial parliamentary polls.

The Uri Party leads in Chungchong and Cholla provinces, while the conservative GNP enjoys dominance in Kangwon and Kyongsang provinces, according to an analysis conducted by The Korea Times based on various other opinion-poll results.

The Uri Party is likely to win in around 100 constituencies across the nation, without fail, while GNP is expected to see a comfortable victory in 80 districts. But boosted by the final stretch, GNP has managed to turn about 50 into close battlefields. Among them, 30 electoral districts are located in Seoul and the surrounding Kyonggi Province.

Of the total 299 lawmakers, voters will directly elect 243 regional representatives. The voters will cast one more ballot to a party they support in order to decide the proportion, based upon which the remaining 56 seats will be filled.

After the opposition-led impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun, the Uri Party was expected to sweep all 97 seats allotted to the metropolitan area. But Park Geun-hye’s leadership enabled the GNP to bounce back while Uri’s Chung Dong-young made a critical tongue slip over senior voters, significantly grinding down Uri’s approval ratings.

Chung said early this month that the seniors could ``stay home and rest’’ on the voting day and let the youngsters decide the future course of the country. The remarks eventually cost his job as top campaign manager of the party and his own ticket to run for the election under the proportional representation system.

Under this circumstance, the Uri Party on Monday lowered its projection, regarding the number of its proportional representatives, from 28 to 22. The GNP, on the contrary, raised it to 17 from 15.

Pollsters say the floating vote ratio has recently risen up to 35 percent. In the 2000 elections, 57.2 percent of the registered voters cast ballots. There were 15 constituencies, which decided winners by the margin of around 1,000 ballots.

im@koreatimes.co.kr