Fragile Victory

Lee took 49.4 percent of the vote in an election with one of the highest voter turnouts on record, nearly 80 percent, against the backdrop of mass rallies and protests that expedited Yoon’s impeachment and the calling of the snap election. His main opponent, Kim Moon-soo of Yoon’s People Power Party (PPP), took 41.1 percent.

The conservatives stood little chance of winning the election. So divided was the party that it struggled to pick its own candidate before finally choosing Kim, a former left activist turned far-right firebrand. Under the circumstances, the PPP should have suffered a far more crushing defeat than it did.

Lee Joon-seok was the candidate of the Reform Party, a PPP splinter that has been courting the country’s cohort of incels, came in third, with 8.3 percent. A distant fourth was Kwon Young-guk, the candidate of a hastily formed Democratic Labor Party, who managed to win just under 1 percent of the vote despite a late start to his campaign and divisions on the Left.

Standing out the most is the sharp shift to the far right among men in their twenties. According to an exit poll conducted by three major TV networks, three-quarters of men in that age group voted for the two far-right candidates. By contrast, just over 58 percent of female voters in their twenties voted for Lee of the DPK, while another 6 percent opted for the left candidate, Kwon. Right-wing predominance was also evident among men in their thirties, with about 60 percent voting for one of the two conservative candidates, while 57 percent of women in that age group supported Lee.

Although Lee’s overall winning margin was more than 8 percent, his victory is more fragile than it might seem. If we exclude two southwestern provinces that constitute the DPK’s traditional stronghold, where he received more than 80 percent of the vote, Lee’s lead over the PPP shrinks to just 26,000 from nearly thirty-five million votes cast. In Seoul, the country’s capital and its political and economic center, the combined conservative vote narrowly exceeded Lee’s support by 0.5 percent.

Despite the narrower than expected margin, Lee can still emerge as arguably the most powerful president in recent South Korean memory. Since his party already has a legislative majority, Lee will be able to fill two vacancies on the Constitutional Court and enact or repeal any law he chooses over the next two years — or indeed throughout his five-year single-term presidency, if the PPP remains too fractured to mount a challenge in the next legislative election. As ever, the DPK’s political fortunes will rest less upon its own strengths than on the shortcomings of its main rival.

Sanders or Trump?

Virtually unknown outside South Korea, Lee is a lawyer and self-made maverick. Between 2010 and 2018, he first gained national recognition as an efficient mayor who rescued Seongnam, a satellite of Seoul in the Gyeonggi province, from a debt crisis. Lee later served as provincial governor, using the position as a launching pad for his presidential bid. Three years ago, Lee lost the presidential election to the now deposed Yoon by less than 1 percent.

According to his own memoirs, Lee was born into a dirt-poor family and had to drop out of secondary school to work in factories to help support his family. A work injury impaired his left arm. In 1982, after passing a series of assessments, the intelligent, street-smart Lee was admitted to a university in Seoul, on a full-merit scholarship thanks to his top SAT scores. Four years later, Lee passed the bar exam, which was notoriously difficult, and become a lawyer.

As is usually the case with a politician’s memoirs, Lee’s account contains inconsistencies about dates, places, and events. However, his rags-to-riches narrative resonates strongly in a country that leapt from war-torn poverty to economic prosperity in a single generation.

The record of Lee’s legal career often contradicts his self-depiction as a human rights lawyer. In 1989, he set up practice as an ambitious twenty-six-year-old lawyer in Seongnam. This backwater, which had been the site of a slum riot in 1971, was on the cusp of a complete makeover.

Over the next thirty years, the city and the province were awash with money, as the government and developers began pouring funds into Seoul’s southern region. This process transformed it into a Silicon Valley–style tech hub and a hip commuter enclave for the young and the rich, while old districts and small factories were razed, displacing residents and workers.

Lee spent most of the 1990s doing civil appeals cases, attracted by the higher fees. During this period, he also began making money through investments in blue-chip stocks. In the 2000s, Lee channeled his political ambitions by leading an anti-corruption civic group in the city.

Throughout his legal career, he was responsible for approximately forty criminal cases. Only two involved violations of the National Security Law, the country’s draconian anti-human rights statute; the remainder dealt with organized crime or felonies. These experiences appear to have shaped Lee’s political outlook, which often comes across as transactional and pragmatic while lacking clear ideological convictions.

However, his gentrification connections frequently left him entangled in corruption allegations — the courts now must decide whether to continue six criminal cases against Lee that have arisen during his public career, ranging from corruption to abuse of power. Without elite connections, Lee always had to surround himself with loyal insiders. Since winning the presidential election, Lee has already filled major government posts with his insiders, breaking his earlier promise of appointing a neutral figure (or even a moderate conservative one) to help bridge the political divides that engulfed the country in the aftermath of Yoon’s aborted coup.

His transactional politics, insulated by a loyal inner circle, has made Lee a fitting leader of today’s DPK. Since the 1990s, the party, once deeply rooted in the country’s pro-democracy movement, has evolved into an amalgam of career politicians — former student activists with a waning commitment to the radical nationalism of their earlier days — and a class of professionals and nouveau riche figures who have amassed wealth and influence from South Korea’s tech and finance sectors.

These neoliberal elites set themselves apart from the chaebol, the sprawling industrial conglomerates that began flourishing in the command economy during the authoritarian era between the 1960s and 1980s. The new wealthy class and the DPK have effectively financialized corruption. In recent years, corruption allegations against DPK figures have invariably implicated venture capital and private equity firms, or real estate developers offering financial stakes or some dubious form of hefty fees. This represents a shift from the established pattern of chaebol corruption scandals that typically involved direct cash bribery.

While global headlines warned of a leftist takeover of the South Korean presidency, there is in fact nothing left-wing about Lee’s political platform. They tend to confuse Lee’s humble beginnings with his politics or mistake his brief dabbling as a governor with a universal income scheme — a measure that after all has plenty of support in capitalist circles, especially among libertarian tech tycoons — for socialist experimentation. When asked last year by the Wall Street Journal about critics comparing him to Bernie Sanders, Lee quipped, “Some have even said I’m like the ‘Trump of Korea.’”

International media outlets suggested that Lee recast himself as a conservative moderate to help his presidential bid. In fact, Lee was always an unapologetically pro-business candidate, committed to extending the legal workweek and further deregulating financial and labor markets. The DPK is a pro-market party in which political expediency routinely trumps respect for judicial independence and procedural integrity. Under Lee’s presidency, South Korea will likely remain one of only two members (together with Japan) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) without antidiscrimination legislation while he attempts to replace much of the social welfare system with direct cash payouts.

Between Washington and Beijing

An immediate challenge to President Lee will likely come from the far-right bloc, recently emboldened by mass participation from young men and renewed backing from evangelical megachurches. The mounting frustrations of small business owners with rising debt and falling levels of consumer consumption will further fuel the far right. These elements will stage protests over baseless claims about the lack of electoral integrity and Chinese interference and push the PPP further rightward, echoing the rhetoric and tactics of the US MAGA movement.

During the election cycle, the US MAGA and its South Korean clone continued to deepen their ties. Morse Tan is a Korean American who served as an ambassador at large during the first Trump administration. Along with two other anti-China MAGA activists, both former US military officers, he appeared in Seoul out of the blue on a monitoring mission for the election.

Next came a White House comment on Lee’s win, expressing concern about Chinese interference without further elaboration. It is unclear if this unusually undiplomatic remark signals that Trump’s White House takes MAGA allegations at face value. What is clear, however, is that Washington is attempting to exploit MAGA’s falsehoods to keep the new South Korean president on a short leash ahead of negotiations over tariffs and security.

The escalating military rivalry between the two superpowers is now pressuring South Korea to choose between the United States and China, abandoning its decades-long strategy of pursuing economic prosperity with China while maintaining military ties with the United States. In December, Washington and Beijing quietly clashed over specific phrases in the DPK’s impeachment motion regarding Yoon’s tilt toward the United States and Japan at China’s expense. That clause was subsequently removed.

Lee has assumed the presidency at the heart of a geopolitical whirlwind. Complex trade and tariff issues with Trump aside, three interconnected geopolitical concerns will overhang his presidency.

South Koreans are increasingly concerned about Trump’s unpredictability, which may result in a unilateral deal with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un that sidelines South Korea’s security concerns about the North’s nuclear arsenal. This will leave South Korea with little option but to develop its own nuclear weapons, burdened by staggering political and economic costs.

Second, they are also worried about the growing possibility of the United States drawing the country into a military conflict between China and Taiwan. South Korea is home to Camp Humphreys, the largest US overseas base, built as a staging ground against China. US intervention in a China–Taiwan conflict will almost immediately place South Korea within the war zone.

Finally, the arms race between the two Koreas has entered a new and perilous stage. Yoon and his military coconspirators could think about provoking the North into a limited conflict as a pretext to justify their coup because they could wager on the South’s superiority in conventional weaponry. Having focused its resources on nuclear development, the North has largely fallen behind in updating its conventional system.

However, intervention in the war in Ukraine has created new opportunities for the North. In return for North Korean troop deployments and munitions, Moscow has provided Pyongyang not just with fuel and food but also with materials and technologies to upgrade its conventional weapons.

Moreover, the North Korean army has been able to observe and learn firsthand how asymmetric warfare plays out on the battlefield, where both Russian and Ukrainian forces have been using inexpensive, agile drones to destroy expensive heavy military equipment and installations. Both Koreas are now locked in a new arms race to outcompete each other in deploying tech-driven, cost-effective asymmetric systems for offense and defense.

This comes on top of their conventional weapon buildup and the North’s nuclear arsenal, plus the South’s simmering desire to go nuclear. With all inter-Korea communications severed following the collapse of the last peacemaking effort four years ago, military tensions are likely to escalate unchecked.

Divided Movement

Organized labor and various left groups have played a pivotal role in sustaining momentum after spontaneous mass protests thwarted Yoon’s attempt to subvert democracy on December 3. Yet that newfound vibrancy and sense of possibility quickly dissipated as the country entered the election cycle.

Divisions emerged over how organized labor and the broader left should respond to Lee’s candidacy. In May, Yang Kyung-soo, the president of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), a million-strong league of independent labor unions, declared that the KCTU was endorsing Lee, without consulting union delegates. It marked the first time since the organization’s 1995 founding that the KCTU had attempted to endorse a liberal presidential candidate — the KCTU charter clearly states that the organization should “pursue the building of a workers’ party.”

Yang’s unilateral move quickly backfired, triggering strong opposition from delegates and sparking a petition drive among staffers. However, the KCTU ultimately failed to endorse any candidate, leaving individual unions to make their own choices. Some endorsed Lee, while, surprisingly, a few others supported the conservative Kim, citing his past credentials as a labor militant.

Yang merely repeated the maneuvering he employed during last year’s legislative election in which a similar unilateral move also met with a strong and effective pushback from delegates. With this latest failed endorsement, Yang has now attempted twice to use the KCTU to facilitate an electoral alliance between the DPK and the Jinbo (“Progressive”) Party, a small left-nationalist party with pro–North Korea leanings. In last year’s general election, the Jinbo Party could seat two members in the National Assembly through a vote-swapping deal with the DPK.

During the current snap election, Jinbo’s presidential candidate dropped out after endorsing Lee. The DPK appeared to have promised Jinbo another legislature seat that would be vacated once a lawmaker left to join the new Lee government. (In South Korea, non-contested proportional representation seats that are assigned to parties based on their share of the vote can be transferred to the next eligible candidate on the party’s list). On June 4, a Jinbo party member, who had temporarily joined the DPK to be eligible for such a vacancy, officially took over the seat after the initial DPK occupant was appointed to a post in the presidential office.

Having been elected twice to the KCTU presidency, largely due to mass votes from unions under Jinbo influence in elections with a low turnout, Yang often faced criticism for prioritizing Jinbo’s needs over the interests of his members. The absence of KCTU support resulted in the left candidate Kwon, who was its first ever in-house lawyer, standing alone against overwhelming odds. His Justice Party had to hurriedly form a new Democratic Labor Party with three other minor left parties because of the South Korean regulations prohibiting a presidential candidate from being nominated by more than one party.

The name “Democratic Labor Party” appeared to be a deliberate choice — its namesake predecessor was the first postwar left party to win a seat in the National Assembly, exactly twenty-one years ago in 2004. A few unions endorsed Kwon, including the Korean Metal Workers’ Union, which spearheaded many anti-Yoon rallies during the leadup to the election.

The fact that Kwon was able to get on the ballot despite a late and underfunded start and eventually took a little under 1 percent of the total vote, with higher levels of support among young female voters, was still a real achievement in a context dominated by the polarization between the two main parties.

Within a day of the final election tally, Kwon’s campaign received an outpouring of small donations totaling more than 1.3 billion won (US $9.6 million), primarily from women in their twenties and thirties. This new dynamic is where the broader left and organized labor must start — to build a strong movement to confront the rising threats of the far right, and to defeat the rampant pro-business agenda of the new government.