Lee Jae Myung re-elected as leader of South Korea's largest opposition party - ”judicial risk” looms even as he looks ahead to the 2027 presidential election

South Korea's largest opposition party, the Democratic Party of Korea, held a party convention on the 18th of this month and re-elected Lee Jae-myung (59) as the party leader. Lee will run in the 2022 presidential election and will be running against Yoon Seok-gi.
He was narrowly defeated by President Yoon Seok-yeol. He is also considered a strong candidate within the party for the next presidential election in 2027, and according to the Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, party members who filled the venue of the party convention held on that day
"President Lee Jae Myung," was one of the voices shouting from the crowd. With a view to running in the next presidential election, he is expected to further strengthen his confrontational stance against the Yoon administration.
In addition to Lee, former cabinet minister Kim Du-gwan (former Gyeongsangnam-do) was also in the running for the leadership.
Three candidates, including the governor of the South Korean province, ran for the election. The results were calculated based on votes from party members and opinion polls, and Lee was elected with 85.4% of the votes. According to Yonhap News, the leader of a political party affiliated with the party was running for reelection.
This is the first time that such a feat has been achieved since former President Kim Dae-jung, who served as president of the National Congress for New Politics from 1995 to 2000.
This surpassed his previous record of 77.77%, the highest vote share in the presidential election. All five of the party's supreme committee members were pro-Lee Jae Myung, close to Lee. The Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported that "The 70-year history of the Democratic Party of Korea has been a great success."
"There has never been a precedent in history for a unitary system like this, with one representative as the one and only core," he said. This time, Lee adopted a new slogan, "Moksanism" (solving the problems of the people's lives).
In his speech after being elected, he said, "The greatest responsibility of politics is to support the lives of the people and create hope," and added, "We must now, in our own individual positions, make a difference in the lives of the people."
"We need to become a more responsible and effective people's party," he said. Lee is a former member of Andong County (now Andong City) in North Gyeongsang Province in the southeast. He grew up in a poor family,
After graduating from elementary school, he worked as a boy factory worker while passing the exams to graduate from middle school and high school. In 1986, he graduated from Chung-Ang University in Korea and became a lawyer. He then moved to Gyeonggi-do, near Seoul.
He served as mayor of Seongnam (Gyeonggi Province) from July 1, 2007 to March 15, 2018, and then served as governor of Gyeonggi Province from July 2018 to October 25 last year.
Lee then ran for president in the March 2022 election and fought a fierce battle with President Yoon until the end, but received only 0.73% of the votes.
He lost by a narrow margin of 100%. Three months later, he ran in a by-election for the National Assembly in the Incheon constituency in the capital region and was elected. Two months after that,
During his two years as party leader, Lee has been pursuing the Yoon administration and has been in fierce opposition to it. He has also criticized the Yoon administration's diplomatic stance, which places importance on Japan-Korea relations, as a "humiliating diplomacy toward Japan."
On the 15th of this month, which is Liberation Day (the anniversary of liberation from Japanese colonial rule), he updated his social media account with the following message: "The Yoon administration is going against the progress of history. I cannot hold my head up high."
He called it an "embarrassing liberation theory," and criticized, "If we ignore the common-sense appeal to correct the past and move forward into the future and reverse history, we will never be able to escape the judgment of the people and history."
"The party will do everything in its power to stop this administration's historic and humiliating diplomacy and pro-Japan steps," he said. The party won a landslide victory over the ruling People's Power Party in the general election in April this year.
Lee holds 170 seats, half of the total. With the party's landslide victory in the general election as a backdrop, he is expected to step up his pressure on the Yoon administration.
Lee is currently facing a legal risk as he faces the 2027 presidential election. He is currently facing allegations of corruption in an urban development project during his time as mayor of Seongnam City, Gyeonggi Province.
He is currently on trial for multiple charges including the murder of a woman who was arrested in a car accident. A verdict on both charges is expected to be handed down in October, and Yonhap News Agency said, "Depending on the verdict, Lee's political career will be at stake, so both the ruling People's Power Party and the Democratic Party of Korea are considering whether to sue him."
"They see this as their Achilles' heel and are likely to step up their offensive."