On June 3, a sixty-year-old maverick candidate from South Korea’s liberal Democratic Party (DPK) won the presidency in a snap election following a botched coup six months earlier by former president Yoon Suk-yeol. On the surface, Lee Jae-myung’s victory seemed like a foregone conclusion.
However, lurking behind the outcome was the reality of a young democracy riven by the rightward drift of establishment politics and the rapid rise of the far right. In contrast, South Korea’s labor movement is divided, at a moment when some on the Left are striving to navigate the crisis and seize new opportunities.
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…
Auteur: Kap Seol
