South Korea election results: divisive ‘scrappy fighter' wins

Times

04-06-2025

Every day, and with increasing intensity over the past week, Kim Se-eui and his staff have gathered in a basement studio in Seoul to dedicate themselves to the downfall and disgrace of South Korea's next president. All day, the team marshal film footage and jazzy graphics to create the nightly broadcast that Kim delivers live on YouTube.
From time to time it features scandals involving celebrity singers or actors. But as South Koreans prepared to vote in the presidential election, its focus shifted to the man heading towards overwhelming victory: Lee Jae-myung, leader of the left-wing Democratic Party.
Claims of corruption, accusations of communist sympathies, allegations of sleazy behaviour by Lee's son — all of it is contentious, much of it is unproven and some of it may be defamatory. Kim cheerfully owns up to having more than a hundred separate legal actions under way against him but shows no sign of relenting.
'This election is a huge decision that will determine the fate of Korea,' he said, shortly before going on air. ' Lee Jae-myung is a very close friend of China, North Korea and Russia. This is very frightening. If Lee is not stopped, the future of Korea will be dark.' Every night, the 70-minute programme is watched by anything from a few hundred thousand to a few million people who agree with him.
On Tuesday, Lee won a comprehensive victory, giving him a powerful mandate for his plans for economic reform and engagement with North Korea, and giving him respite from the corruption charges that had threatened to end his political career. He was declared the victor after 98 per cent of the votes were counted. Polls gave Lee 49.2 per cent of the vote, according to Yonhap news agency, compared with 41.5 per cent for his closest rival, Kim Moon-soo of the conservative People Power Party.
Victory had been predicted by opinion polls, but the margin of projected victory exceeded the most recent, which had suggested late gains for Kim.
Conceding defeat, Kim said he 'respectfully accepts the choice of the people'.
Lee told a crowd of supporters outside the National Assembly: 'We've proved that that power is not to be used for the president's personal interests, but for the bright future of this country,', appearing to reference his conservative competitor's previous use of martial law.
Lee said that the 'first duty' voters had given his future government was to 'recover the democracy of the country'. The second was to 'restore' the country's faltering economy.
But the result disguises one of the most distinctive facts about Lee: the divisive character of his politics. For all his popularity, a large minority of South Koreans oppose him with a vehemence bordering on hatred. He gives his campaign speeches in a bulletproof vest after being stabbed in the neck last year by one enraged citizen. This year, at least two supporters of the man he seeks to replace, the impeached former president Yoon Suk-yeol, set themselves on fire in protest at what they saw as Lee's persecution of their leader.
South Korean politics has always been polarised, between left and right and between different regions of the country, but since December the divisions have become more painful and bitter than ever. It was then that Yoon, after laws he proposed were repeatedly blocked by the opposition majority in parliament, took the extraordinary step of declaring martial law.
The attempt at a presidential coup appalled most South Koreans and was blocked by MPs, including some from Yoon's own party; apart from being impeached, he faces criminal charges of insurrection.
The debacle was a gift to Lee, who narrowly lost the 2022 election to Yoon. But rather than allowing the consequences of Yoon's self-destructive act to play themselves out, Lee and his party pursued him with a relentless aggression that struck many in Korea as excessive, passing more than 30 impeachment motions against the former president, ministers and senior officials.
'Democracy requires some sort of consensus-based politics and … I don't think [Lee] is the man for that,' said Steven Denney, a Korea expert at Leiden University. 'He's not a consensus builder. He's not a man of the centre. He's a rough-and-tumble, scrappy fighter who is more likely to persecute those on the other side than he is to shake their hand.'
Those who hate Lee point to the various legal cases, including criminal charges of corruption, ongoing against him, none of them yet resolved. But the odium that he arouses may also be connected with his background.
• Why do South Korean presidents have such a high disaster rate?
Lee will not be South Korea's first working-class president but none has had a more deprived upbringing. His family could not afford to send him to secondary school. Instead, he worked in a factory where he suffered a permanent disability after his arm was caught in a machine.
He studied on his own to win a scholarship to study law at university; then went on to become mayor of the city of Seongnam and governor of Gyeonggi, South Korea 's most populous province. His doctrine of 'Meoksanism', which can roughly be translated as 'bread-and-butter-ism', prioritises practical issues such as jobs, housing and social welfare over abstract ideology. But to nervous members of the South Korean elite, in a country with high levels of inequality, it has about it a whiff of class warfare.
Conscious of the accusations that he is pro-North Korean, Lee has attempted to position the Democrats as what he calls a 'centrist-conservative' party. There is no evidence that Lee is a communist sympathiser, although, like all of South Korea's previous left-leaning presidents, he is likely to seek engagement rather than confrontation with North Korea.
On Tuesday, he told supporters at a rally he would resume dialogue with the northern neighbour. 'Creating peace is a more certain way of creating security,' Lee said.
With such a decisive lead, he has little motivation to spell out many specifics. He has been polite but vague about President Trump; aides say that he is still working out his approach to China. His greatest and most fundamental challenge may be the one closest to home, and the one that contradicts his instincts: how to soothe his enemies and restore a measure of unity to scared and angry South Koreans.