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 Get together grappled with a raft of authorized troubles and scandals.
However after Yoon made a botched try to position South Korea beneath martial regulation 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 develop 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 important query: is he the regular hand South Korea wants when the corruption investigations and abuse of energy allegations towards him are sure to solid 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 regulation 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 capability to offer the secure management the nation wants. Whereas he campaigned as a pragmatist centered on home points, his document of confrontational politics, ongoing authorized troubles and polarising rhetoric increase doubts about his capability to unite a divided nation.
“Lee seems to be holding the lead towards his essential conservative rival. His authorized issues solid 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 Impartial earlier.
Yoon’s martial regulation declaration created months of political instability, triggering a wave of public discontent together with his Individuals Energy Get together that Lee sought to experience into the highest spot.
The Individuals Energy Get together’s Kim Moon Soo constantly trailed in polls regardless of projecting himself as a average going up towards the “harbinger of monster politics and dictatorship”, as he has described Lee. Kim was conscious of the necessity to entice the centrist vote if he had been to have any probability towards 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 successful 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 Impartial.
“Within the case of Lee, the outlook appears much more regarding, given his previous management fashion and the continuing authorized circumstances towards him,” he provides.
“His method has typically been confrontational quite than conciliatory, which can not align with the consensus-building management South Korea urgently requires.”
Lee has positioned himself as a practical 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, increase 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 primary revenue which attraction to economically discontented voters however danger deepening current political divisions.
The liberal chief’s “confrontational rhetoric and polarising management fashion 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 acutely aware selection, geared toward enjoying up certainly 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 damage 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 deal with financial equality.
He grew as much as examine regulation on a scholarship, handed the Bar in 1986 and labored as a human rights and labour lawyer for about 20 years.
He made his political debut in 2005 with the Uri Get together, a predecessor to the Democratic Get together, and was elected mayor of Seongnam, south of Seoul, 5 years later.
Aiming for greater workplace, he contested and gained the 2018 election for governor of Gyeonggi-do, South Korea’s most populous province.
Now set to steer the nation, Lee is looking for to reconcile his picture as a polarising populist with the extra measured, pragmatic tone of his present marketing campaign.
“Lee is working as a pragmatist and his marketing campaign proposals have been much less polarising than prior to now,” Aoki mentioned earlier. “If he wins, the important thing factor is whether or not he can stick with 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.
Not like Yoon, who pursued a extra hardline method in the direction of North Korea, Lee has mentioned 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 throughout the campaigning. Regardless of who wins on this election, they may have a slight departure from former president Yoon Suk Yeol‘s hardline method 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 Improvement Coverage in Sweden, informed The Impartial earlier.
Aoki says Lee presumably extending an olive department to Pyongyang is no surprise. “His official platform doesn’t embody, for instance, grand gestures like inter-Korean summits or financial cooperation however quite focuses on smaller trust-building measures,” she provides.
Now that Lee has gained, he should take care of a string of authorized circumstances, together with a $1bn property improvement scandal from his time as mayor of Seongnam. In what is named the “Daejang-dong scandal”, he has been indicted on prices of bribery, corruption, breach of belief, and conflicts of curiosity.
In one other authorized case, Lee was convicted final November of violating the election regulation for making a false assertion throughout a debate within the 2022 presidential marketing campaign. An appeals courtroom overturned Lee’s conviction, however the Supreme Court docket reinstated it and ordered a brand new sentence to be handed out. The sentencing, nonetheless, 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 Get together to undermine his political profession.
