South Korea now has a president, but it is still divided
Lee Jae-Myung ran as a centrist; hopefully he governs like one.
By David P. Fields
For the first time in six months, South Korea has a duly elected president. On 3 June, Lee Jae-Myung, candidate for the liberal Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), defeated Kim Mun-soo of the conservative People Power Party (PPP). Lee won a snap election that was called after the impeachment of conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol. Yoon’s impeachment temporarily suspended his presidency in January as he stood trial before the Supreme Court of Korea for illegally declaring martial law in December 2024. The court upheld his impeachment and removed him from the presidency in April, clearing the way for this new election.
To make sense of the election—and Korean politics in general—it is important to understand that although the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are used to describe the ideological orientation of Korean parties and politicians, these terms do not mean the same thing in Korea that they mean in the United States or even in much of Europe.
Rather than the role of government in society and divisive social issues (abortion, gay marriage, immigration), three topics define the differences between liberals and conservatives in Korea: relations with North Korea, the South Korean alliance with the United States, and views of Korea’s historical traumas.
On North Korea, liberals generally favor more engagement with North Korea, even without preconditions. Conservatives generally feel that North Korea needs to show some change in a positive direction before it is given any further inducements.
Regarding the South Korean alliance with the U.S., both liberals and conservatives generally support the alliance; however, liberals would like to see more autonomy for Seoul within that alliance. They fear that the attachment to Washington might entrap South Korea in a military conflict between the U.S. and China. Conservatives have more confidence in the alliance and would like to see it deepened.
Looking to the past, liberals frequently demand justice for the historical traumas Koreans have suffered in the past century, whether they were at the hands of Japanese colonial officials or Korea’s own military dictators. Korean conservatives generally view military dictators as a necessary evil that fostered the development of their country. They believe that Korea-Japan relations should focus on the future, rather than the past, and former President Yoon acted accordingly.
Although these divergent political positions have divided liberals and conservatives since Korea’s democratization in the 1980s, the current election was not waged along these well-worn ideological lines. Instead, both candidates and their parties tried to tack to South Korea’s center.
The liberal DPK did this by sounding a lot like conservatives. Lee Jae-Myung emphasized the security threat of North Korea and praised the legacy of Korea’s historical dictators. These comments are not particularly on brand for Lee, who launched his political career in opposition to Korea’s military dictatorship. In 2024, when he served as governor of Gyeonggi Province, Lee was indicted over a scheme to secretly transfer funds to North Korea to organize a visit with its hermetic leadership. This indictment was just one of many. Lee’s legal troubles are numerous; until last month, it was an open question whether he was legally able to stand for election.
The conservative PPP moved towards the center by running a candidate, Kim Mun-soo, whose biography looked similar to those that the liberal DPK has been running for years. Inspired by the self-immolation of Jeon Tae-il—the patron saint of Korean labor—Kim became a labor rights activist as a college student in the 1970s. For his activism, he was expelled from university, arrested, and tortured on several occasions. With this background, Kim was not a typical Korean conservative.
During their campaign, both candidates crafted platforms designed to appeal to the center. They focused on Korea's economy, plunging birth rate, grinding corporate culture, and sky-high housing prices. Neither North Korea nor the U.S.-Korea alliance played much of a role, because this election was not really about policy, but about whether Koreans would punish the PPP for Yoon Suk Yeol’s attack on Korean democracy last year. Millions of Koreans did. The PPP candidate received about 2 million fewer votes than in the last presidential election in 2022. Lee Jae-myung received almost a million more votes than in 2022, in which he narrowly lost to Yoon Suk Yeol.
Despite this swing, this election should not be seen as a victory for Lee as much as a defeat for the conservative PPP. There was a third candidate in the race, young conservative Lee Jun-seok, who siphoned nearly 3 million votes away from the PPP. In fact, the total of the votes cast for the two conservative candidates, Kim and Lee, was slightly greater (by around 20,000) than the votes cast for the DPK’s victorious Lee Jae-myung. These results show that Koreans are still evenly divided between the liberal and conservative camps.
The urgent question is: How will liberal Lee Jae-myung rule? Like the centrist he campaigned as, or as the Korean liberal he has traditionally been? Time will tell, but there are compelling reasons why Lee should govern as a centrist.
The deterioration of U.S.-China relations may be outpacing North Korea as the primary security threat facing South Korea. Also, North Korea’s open involvement in the Ukraine War and alignment with Russia make outreach to that regime less appealing both internationally and domestically. When it comes to U.S.-South Korea relations, the Trump Administration’s tariffs are certainly now the most pressing bilateral issue.
Surely Lee Jae-myung’s first task as president will be to conjure a trade and investment deal he can barter to the Trump Administration in return for lower American tariffs. Trump's tariffs are already hitting the country hard, with exports to the United States down 8.1% in May. Reaching a beneficial deal with Washington will surely earn Lee some goodwill domestically, even from the half of the Korean electorate that did not vote for him.
Governing pragmatically from the center is the best hope for some stability in South Korean politics. Americans and other friends of Seoul should encourage this approach. Productive, open trade relations are more important than ever.
David Fields is the associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and the co-editor of Divided America, Divided Korea: The US and Korea During and After the Trump Years (Cambridge University Press, 2024). He has been published in the Washington Post, The National Interest, North Korea Review, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, SinoNK.com, NKnews.org, Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society-Korea Branch, and in the Working Papers Series of the Cold War International History Project. His commentary and analysis have appeared on National Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Radio, C-SPAN, and CNN in addition to local radio and television.