South Korea has endured 6 months of political turmoil. What can we expect in Lee's presidency?

Japan Today

2 days ago

FILE - Democratic Party presidential candidate Lee Jae-myung, second left, hurls a baseball during a presidential election campaign event at Jamsil Sports Complex in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, May 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File)
By FOSTER KLUG
Images from the election of South Korea's new president, liberal Lee Jae-myung, are everything you'd expect to see in one of the world's most vibrant democracies.
Peaceful. Orderly. And, because this is South Korea, compulsively eye-catching, with crowds singing raucously along to blaring K-pop, dancers bouncing in closely choreographed sequences, and color-coordinated outfits for the two front-runners and their supporters — blue for Lee, who was inaugurated Wednesday for a single, five-year term, red for the distant runner-up, conservative Kim Moon Soo.
What the pictures don't capture is the absolute turmoil of the past six months, making Tuesday one of the strangest — and, possibly, most momentous -- election days since the country emerged in the late 1980s from decades of dictatorship.
Since Dec. 3, South Koreans have watched, stunned, as an extraordinary sequence of events unfolded: Then-South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, a first since the dictatorship. In response, lawmakers, leaping fences and jostling with heavily armed soldiers, elbowed their way into a besieged parliament to vote the declaration down. Yoon was then impeached and removed from office and now, just two months after his fall, another president has taken office.
Here is a look at Lee's victory, the startling events that set up the election, and the challenges Lee faces to heal a nation split along a host of political and social fault lines.
They are, in a way, older than the nation.
The Korean Peninsula was initially divided into a Soviet-backed north and U.S.-backed south after World War II. The states formalized the division in 1948, and the 1950-53 Korean War made it permanent, dividing the rivals along the Demilitarized Zone, one of the most heavily armed borders in the world.
But the tensions go beyond geography. During the long fight for democracy during South Korea's dictatorships, several fractures arose that persist today: the contentions between liberals and conservatives, but also gaps between rich and poor, old and young and men and women.
Since the end of dictatorship, over and over the country has seen its democracy tested.
By its own leaders.
By its antagonistic neighbor to the north.
By each new generation's reaction to a tumultuous history of forced geographic division, war, dictatorship, and one of the most breakneck economic turnarounds in world history.
Preceding Tuesday's election, thousands of protesters took to the streets, both supporting the deposed Yoon and denouncing him.
'Above all, the president must bring unity among a divided and confused public, which was caused by the martial law declaration,' Park Soo Hyun, a 22-year-old student, said Wednesday.
Lee's party has a majority in parliament that will presumably allow the new president a freer hand in pushing through liberal legislation, including more funding for welfare programs and policies to address high living costs, joblessness and corruption.
Typically, liberals like Lee have been more wary of South Korea's traditional allies, the United States and Japan, than conservatives. They have also often looked for reconciliation with North Korea.
The United States sees South Korea as a crucial buttress against China and Russia and North Korea's growing nuclear capabilitie s. The South hosts nearly 30,000 U.S. troops.
Lee, however, will have to find a way to keep his liberal base happy while managing the relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump, who has threatened Seoul with tariffs and has generally been lukewarm about the importance of the alliance.
Lee has also been dogged by a raft of corruption cases, and it's not yet clear how much of a drag those will be on his presidency.
"I will make sure there is no more military coup d'état, in which the power entrusted by the people would never be used to intimidate people,' Lee said in his victory speech early Wednesday morning, referring to the martial law decree.
Experts say it's a little of both. The last half-year has worsened already raw divisions, even as it highlighted the underlying strength of a rough-and-tumble democratic process.
'Fierce ideological divisions still infuse politics, which could impede South Korea's chances to grow into a truly mature democracy," Duyeon Kim, a visiting professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, wrote recently for the Council on Foreign Relations.
But Tuesday's vote and Wednesday's inauguration signaled a return to a more normal democracy.
And even the crisis itself showed the resiliency of South Korea's institutions.
A crowd helped lawmakers get past troops and into parliament to overturn the martial law decree. The soldiers who carried out Yoon's orders did so without enthusiasm and didn't use force against the people, John Delury, a Korea expert and visiting professor at John Cabot University, said Tuesday.
Korean democracy is in the people's hands, he said, not any one person's, even the new president's. Lee 'enters office with a strong mandate. But he is not the savior of democracy," said Delury. "Korean people saved it themselves. Now they are entrusting him not to do any more damage to it for the next five years.'
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