Just three years after narrowly dropping the presidential election to conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, Lee Jae Myung has emerged, phoenix-like, as the brand new chief of South Korea.
Such a prospect appeared unlikely till a number of months in the past because the chief of the liberal Democratic Celebration grappled with a raft of authorized troubles and scandals.
However after Yoon made a botched try to position South Korea underneath martial legislation in December and, as a consequence, was impeached out of workplace, Lee projected himself as a protector of the democratic order and began to achieve in public polls.
Now Lee is poised to turn into the following South Korean president, exit polls confirmed, with the 61-year-old set to succeed Yoon in a deeply polarised and politically weary nation.
His rise to the cusp of energy, although, additionally raises a essential query: is he the regular hand South Korea wants when the corruption investigations and abuse of energy allegations in opposition to him are sure to forged a shadow over his presidency?
Lee, described by his advisers as a “gladiator in a swimsuit”, moved rapidly into the highlight as he aggressively countered Yoon’s disastrous martial legislation decree. Throughout the disaster in late 2024, he climbed onto the fence of the Nationwide Meeting constructing to evade the president’s safety guards and documented the chaos on a livestream.
Analysts stay sceptical about his means to offer the steady management the nation wants. Whereas he campaigned as a pragmatist targeted on home points, his document of confrontational politics, ongoing authorized troubles and polarising rhetoric elevate doubts about his capability to unite a divided nation.
“Lee seems to be holding the lead in opposition to his major conservative rival. His authorized issues forged a shadow, and relying on developments, South Korea’s political management issues might proceed even when he wins the election,” Naoko Aoki, political scientist at RAND, informed The Unbiased earlier.
Yoon’s martial legislation declaration created months of political instability, triggering a wave of public discontent together with his Individuals Energy Celebration that Lee sought to trip into the highest spot.
The Individuals Energy Celebration’s Kim Moon Soo persistently trailed in polls regardless of projecting himself as a average going up in opposition to the “harbinger of monster politics and dictatorship”, as he has described Lee. Kim was conscious of the necessity to appeal to the centrist vote if he had been to have any probability in opposition to the liberal frontrunner.
Sojin Lim, co-director of Korean Research on the College of Central Lancashire, supplied a bleak image of the rising political state of affairs, arguing that the prospect of Lee profitable was regarding. “It doesn’t seem that any of the present presidential candidates have the potential to be efficient leaders in South Korea, significantly in addressing the a number of challenges the nation faces each domestically and internationally,” she tells The Unbiased.
“Within the case of Lee, the outlook appears much more regarding, given his previous management model and the continued authorized circumstances in opposition to him,” he provides.
“His strategy has usually been confrontational fairly than conciliatory, which can not align with the consensus-building management South Korea urgently requires.”
Lee has positioned himself as a realistic chief, advocating for insurance policies that attraction to a broad citizens. His proposals, addressing requires decreasing presidential powers after Yoon’s actions, embody affecting constitutional adjustments to have a two-term presidency, a run-off election system, and parliamentary nomination of the prime minister.
He additionally goals to shorten the work week, elevate the retirement age, and fight the inhabitants disaster with housing and tax advantages for households.
Lim says what units Lee aside is his populist platform, centred on expansive welfare pledges like a common fundamental revenue which attraction to economically discontented voters however danger deepening present political divisions.
The liberal chief’s “confrontational rhetoric and polarising management model might alienate conservative factions, making bipartisan cooperation troublesome in an already fragile political local weather”, she explains.
“To manipulate successfully he would want to mood his populist agenda with inclusive policymaking and deliberate efforts to bridge ideological and/or political divides.”
Lee has sought to resonate with youthful voters by donning blue-and-red Reebok sneakers, colors of the nationwide flag. The sporting of these sneakers, which rapidly turned a coveted commodity after he began sporting them on the marketing campaign path, was a aware selection, geared toward enjoying up considered one of his pledges to unite South Korea’s liberal and conservative voters.
Lee was born to a household of farmers in a distant mountain village within the nation’s southeastern area. He labored in chemical factories as a toddler, struggling an industrial accident that left him with a everlasting harm to his arm and impaired listening to.
He has used his rags-to-riches story on the marketing campaign path, citing his impoverished childhood to give attention to financial equality.
He grew as much as research legislation on a scholarship, handed the Bar in 1986 and labored as a human rights and labour lawyer for about twenty years.
He made his political debut in 2005 with the Uri Celebration, a predecessor to the Democratic Celebration, and was elected mayor of Seongnam, south of Seoul, 5 years later.
Aiming for greater workplace, he contested and received the 2018 election for governor of Gyeonggi-do, South Korea’s most populous province.
Now set to steer the nation, Lee is searching for to reconcile his picture as a polarising populist with the extra measured, pragmatic tone of his present marketing campaign.
“Lee is operating as a pragmatist and his marketing campaign proposals have been much less polarising than previously,” Aoki stated earlier. “If he wins, the important thing factor is whether or not he can follow these positions.”
Managing relations with South Korea’s neighbours, particularly North Korea and China, is about to be one of many key challenges for the incoming president.
In contrast to Yoon, who pursued a extra hardline strategy in the direction of North Korea, Lee has stated he would search to ease tensions by restoring a army hotline and a army settlement ditched by Pyongyang amid rising animosity in 2023.
“North Korea continues to stay a political focus in the course of the campaigning. Irrespective of who wins on this election, they may have a slight departure from former president Yoon Suk Yeol‘s hardline strategy on North Korea and China,” Dr Jagannath Panda, head of the Stockholm Centre for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs on the Institute for Safety and Growth Coverage in Sweden, informed The Unbiased earlier.
Aoki says Lee presumably extending an olive department to Pyongyang isn’t a surprise. “His official platform doesn’t embody, for instance, grand gestures like inter-Korean summits or financial cooperation however fairly focuses on smaller trust-building measures,” she provides.
Now that Lee has received, he must take care of a string of authorized circumstances, together with a $1bn property growth scandal from his time as mayor of Seongnam. In what is named the “Daejang-dong scandal”, he has been indicted on expenses of bribery, corruption, breach of belief, and conflicts of curiosity.
In one other authorized case, Lee was convicted final November of violating the election legislation for making a false assertion throughout a debate within the 2022 presidential marketing campaign. An appeals court docket overturned Lee’s conviction, however the Supreme Courtroom reinstated it and ordered a brand new sentence to be handed out. The sentencing, nevertheless, was postponed till after the election to keep away from influencing the end result.
One other case is linked to an alleged scheme to make use of an underwear firm to switch funds to North Korea and facilitate a go to to Pyongyang when he was governor between 2019 and 2020.
Lee has denied wrongdoing in all circumstances, calling them a “witch hunt” by the Individuals’s Energy Celebration to undermine his political profession.
