Exclusive: Lee Jae-myung Aims to Steer South Korea Through Crisis

Yahoo

2 days ago

Lee Jae-myung as candidate for party leader at the 2022 Democratic Party of Korea convention. Credit - Courtesy of the Lee Jae-myung Presidential Campaign
It's with a bashful grin that Lee Jae-myung tugs down his starched collar to reveal the half-inch scar where a would-be assassin's blade pierced his neck. The assailant had asked the leader of South Korea's Democratic Party for an autograph in January last year before lunging at him with a camping knife.
'But compared to President Donald Trump,' Lee says unprompted, 'who had to endure a bullet that went by his ear, I can say that it had less of an impact.'
While nobody would minimize July's attempted assassination of Trump near Butler, Penn., the suggestion that his clipped ear was graver than Lee's wound stretches credulity. Trump walked from the dais triumphantly punching the air; Lee was air-lifted to a hospital and spent days in intensive care following a two-hour surgery to repair a sliced jugular vein, with the wound a whisker from severing his carotid artery.
But if contemporary diplomacy demands anything, it is deference to the notoriously skin-thinned 47th U.S. President—whether about his golf skill, rally size, or near-death experience. And as the clear frontrunner in South Korea's June 3 presidential election, Lee is already in full statesman mode.
'He has outstanding skills in terms of negotiation and bargaining,' Lee tells TIME in his only interview on the campaign trail. And he stands for the interests of the American people, which I think is desirable. The same applies for my position as well; I also need to look out for the interests of the Korean people, for their better lives, and for South Korea's national interests.'
Lee's next test in safeguarding those interests promises to be trickier: restoring stability to South Korea following the tumultuous ouster of former President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose impeachment was confirmed in April following his December 2024 declaration of martial law. Lee, who lost the 2022 election to Yoon by just 0.7%, led the charge for his rival's removal after live streaming himself climbing the National Assembly fence to bypass a police blockade in order to vote to repeal the martial law order.
That controversy brought back dark memories of military dictatorship, as well as tens of thousands of South Koreans onto the street. It also galvanized support for Lee, who has in the eyes of many assumed the moral high ground, despite facing criminal charges for breaking election law himself (the case is pending).
Still, as Tuesday's ballot approaches, polls give the progressive Lee a double-digit lead over his closest rival, Kim Moon-soo, who represents the same conservative People Power Party (PPP) as the disgraced Yoon. Trailing the pack is former PPP lawmaker Lee Jun-seok, representing the upstart Reform Party. With the conservative vote split, Lee looks like a shoo-in.
'I would say Lee's chances are 95%,' says Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul. 'And this is a polite understatement.'
Not that Lee would have much time for celebrations. A packed agenda awaits whoever reaches the presidential office, including fixing a torpid economy, quelling an increasingly belligerent North Korea, and navigating an escalating global trade war. While other nations have been furiously negotiating with the White House to forge new trade deals in the wake of Trump's 'reciprocal' tariffs introduced last month, South Korea's political vacuum has meant no progress has been made in reducing the 25% levy slapped on South Korean exports. Last year, South Korea sent cars worth $34.74 billion to the U.S., accounting for 49% of all its auto exports, yet American sales have dropped for the second straight month.
Lee says that coming to an accord with the world's biggest economy is a top priority. 'It is very important for us to engage in reasonable and rational conversations and come up with a solution that would benefit all,' he says.
Political paralysis is a problem anytime but doubly so when tensions are raised on the peninsula. In recent months North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has deployed troops to aid Russian President Vladimir Putin's war of choice in Ukraine, and Pyongyang conducted 47 missile tests in 2024 alone.
But the demilitarized zone that has split the Korean peninsula since an armistice effectively ended the 1950-53 Korean War is far from the most pressing divide requiring attention. Lee will also have to find a way to heal his riven nation, whose people are utterly demoralized with bickering, partisanship, and a pathological inability to find consensus on any issue. Many conservatives and even centrists have been left enraged by how Yoon's impeachment and criminal investigation was handled by law enforcement agencies, courts, and also the National Assembly.
Lee sees boosting opportunities for the next generation as one answer, solemnly noting that South Korea's economic growth rate drops by roughly one percent per presidential term, meaning last year's 2% may be wiped out soon unless drastic action is taken. 'That has made young people feel that there's no hope for them,' he says. 'The fundamental solution is to bring back growth, and second is to mitigate the extreme polarization that the society is facing.'
If the scar that adorns Lee's neck wasn't evidence enough of just how viciously polarized South Korea has become, more comes in the shape of Tom, the lanky German shepherd enlisted to sweep our meeting room on the 9th floor of Seoul's Democratic Party headquarters for explosives. But in the redemptive arc of Lee's life story, even that knife attack doesn't stand out against the myriad hardships he has had to endure.
Lee was born the fifth of seven children in an impoverished farming family in a tiny village in South Korea's bucolic east, where the whole family lived in a single room. In his retelling, he would walk a four-hour round trip to elementary school each day before returning home to plow fields. Too poor to even afford paper or crayons, on one occasion Lee was forced to clean the school toilets while his classmates went on an outing to an art contest. The school's small library was Lee's haven, allowing him to lose himself in adventure books such as Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as a fleeting respite from the bleakness that awaited at home.
After quitting school at just 13, Lee lied about his age to work in factories and frequently fell victim to crooked bosses withholding wages. At one job, his wrist was crushed in a pressing machine, an injury that left him in constant pain and officially designated as disabled. That anguish, combined with his father's gambling addiction, led the young Lee to attempt suicide.
'Having a difficult life is not my unique experience,' he says. 'But compared to elitist politicians who only view these things from outside, I had the privilege of actually experiencing them.'
Despite no formal secondary education, Lee was accepted to law school at the first attempt and passed the national bar exam immediately after graduation. He plunged himself into human and labor rights cases, determined to help exploited and disenfranchised workers like his past self. Later he went into politics and was elected Seongnam City Mayor and then Governor of Gyeonggi Province.
Lee proved himself both popular and populist, earning the sobriquet of 'Korea's Trump' during the 2022 election, though more for his trite solutions than any shared backstory or policy platform. During that campaign, Lee drew scorn for suggesting that hair loss treatment should be paid for by the state. He also advocated for a policy where 1 million won ($840 at the time) would be given to every citizen annually. Before the current election, he reprised a diluted version of this policy by proposing cash or voucher handouts of 250,000 won ($180 today) for Korea's entire 50 million population at a total cost of some $9 billion—touting a debunked 'hotel economics' theory of consumption whereby phantom cash injections have a similar positive stimulus as real ones. (Lee now says whether to implement the scheme will be reviewed following the election.)
But it's a focus on bromide policies that Lee's critics say are papering over cracks of the structural issues that blight Korean society. For ordinary South Koreans, bread-and-butter issues dominate campaigning, such as boosting jobs, lowering inflation, increasing affordable housing, reforming pensions, and tackling chaos in the schools, where bullying and assaults spurred over 32,000 teachers to quit before retirement age between 2019 and 2024, with a record high of 9,194 last year alone.
But even if Lee wins as big as polls predict, it's doubtful that he can make any movement on structural reform. His Democratic Party predecessor, Moon Jae-in, had three years with a near supermajority in the legislature but had his agenda frustrated by party colleagues with little appetite for painful corrective measures.
Other than doggedly pursuing an ultimately fruitless rapprochement with Pyongyang, the only two policies Moon managed to push through were cutting out nuclear power, which drastically increased South Korea's coal usage, and hiking the minimum wage, which pushed many young people out of work and closed small businesses. 'Moon only had these two failed policies in three years [of legislative control],' says Sean O'Malley, a professor and political scientist at Dongseo University in Busan. 'So I don't really expect any major structural changes this time around.'
Red tape and structural bottlenecks are the greatest obstacle to energizing South Korea's moribund economy. Lee has called for over 50,000 GPUs to boost the nation's AI industry, while in February the government announced it was building the world's largest AI data center. But the devil is in the details: the data center alone would require three gigawatts to run—or the equivalent of three nuclear reactors—at a time when state energy company Korea Electric Power Corp. is already $141.5 billion in debt.
Lee has touted bringing nuclear back into the mix alongside renewables, but how Korea will power the revamping of its economy remains a huge question. Such woes may come as a surprise to Americans who think of South Korea in terms of world-leading firms like Samsung, Hyundai, and LG, as well as zeitgeist-defining cultural exports like K-pop sensations BTS or Blackpink and Netflix drama Squid Game. But South Korea's story has always been one of struggle. Following the ravages of World War II and the Korean War, South Korea was derided as 'the sick man of Asia,' and for many years it was even more impoverished than the Stalinist north, which retained most of the peninsula's industrial base.
Tuesday's election will come down to domestic issues, but the spectre of relations across the DMZ looms over the ballot. While Lee has made clear his priority is the economy, the occupant of the White House has other ideas. Trump has indicated his desire to return to the negotiating table with Kim Jong Un, after their 2019 Hanoi Summit ended in dramatic failure. Asked by reporters during an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Jan. 20 whether he had plans to reestablish relations with Kim, Trump said: 'I would … I have a great relationship with Kim Jong Un, and we'll see what happens, but certainly he's a nuclear power.'
The inference that Trump accepts North Korea as a nuclear state has led to speculation that any future negotiations may focus on reducing rather than eliminating the country's estimated arsenal of some 70 atomic bombs. Meanwhile, Trump's recent promise of a 'golden dome' to protect the U.S. from missile threats has further alarmed East Asian allies who rely on America's security architecture.
Today, around 70% of South Koreans support developing their own nuclear deterrent. Lee disagrees, however, saying that North Korea's nuclear capability and South Korea's 'formidable conventional power' have reached a 'balance of terror.' Adding nuclear weapons, he posits, would 'trigger a domino effect, where Japan and other countries go nuclear. The United States would want to avoid that.'
Certainly, North Korea's recent moves—sending weapons, ammunition, and troops to aid Putin's war in Ukraine—not to mention development of nuclear missiles, has turned a regional nuisance into a security migraine for Europe and the entire globe. North Korea's extensive help for Russia naturally has South Korean officials concerned about what Pyongyang is receiving in return. Beyond simply cash, this might be advanced weaponry and technological expertise to help North Korea perfect satellite, submarine, and re-entry technology for its ballistic missiles.
'North Korea is in the best situation it has ever been for 35 years,' says Lankov. 'They have money from sales of ammunition and other military goods to Russia. And they have almost unconditional, if limited, Chinese support.'
At present, Lee's hands are largely tied by the bevy of U.N. sanctions from 2016 and 2017 that effectively bar any economic inducements. But if Trump is to rekindle the world's greatest diplomatic soap opera—negotiating with the North Korean leader he once mocked as 'little rocket man' but later claimed he 'fell in love' with—few could stop him. 'Kim Jong Un is waiting for some signal from Trump,' says Kim Chol-min, a Seoul-based North Korean defector who used to handle the leadership's secret funds in China and the Middle East and uses a pseudonym for his family's security. 'Then they will start talking.'
Lee agrees. 'I understand that President Trump expects to engage in dialogue with Kim Jong Un,' he says. 'That is helpful for the peace of the Korean peninsula, as well as for Northeast Asia.'
While Moon Jae-in was instrumental in getting Trump and Kim to sit down, once negotiations began, South Korea found itself sidelined. Officials in Seoul are wary of the nation's security being bargained away, mindful of the treatment dished out to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 'It's not like Trump is going to put any interest into what Lee thinks about this project,' says O'Malley.
Lee sees things differently. 'Even if the United States and North Korea engage in direct talks, certain economic cooperation or assistance-related issues could still arise,' says Lee. 'It's not easy structurally to actually sideline the South Korean government.'
North Korea has always been a contentious and divisive topic in the South. Since democratization in the 1980s, South Korean politics have been ideologically divided largely along Cold War lines, with conservatives lauding the achievements of the former military regime, favoring ties with Japan, and accusing their detractors of being pro-Pyongyang. Their progressive opponents, meanwhile, accuse the conservatives of anti-democratic tendencies and riding roughshod over human rights.
It's not the only split between the camps, of course. In recent years, conservative Presidents including Yoon have increasingly been interested in contributing to regional and global security challenges far from the Korean Peninsula. However, progressive governments have been less adventurous in foreign policy, focusing more on Inter-Korean relations. Asked whether he would come to Taiwan's aid if the self-ruling island was attacked by China, Lee gives a cryptic reply: 'I will think about that answer when aliens are about to invade the earth.'
Lee has previously been known as friendly towards China, though he has toned down some of that rhetoric at the stump to court the centrist vote. And regarding the U.S.-South Korea alliance, Lee has previously been rather cold towards Washington in line with Democratic Party orthodoxy. However, his tone has been more positive towards the U.S. on the campaign trail—and not just because of Trump. 'South Korea is one of the world's most pro-American countries,' says Lankov. 'Even if the leadership of the South Korean left is not very enthusiastic about the United States, open confrontation is not going to sell with the public.'
Speaking to TIME, Lee even lauded Korean-based American forces that 'actually play a very important critical role for the United States policy of containment against China.' Lee also praised Washington's nascent rapprochement with Moscow, which he believes is 'a means to exert pressure on China,' as potentially benefiting South Korea via the possible opening of Arctic shipping routes. 'If so, it could offer strategic advantages not only for the U.S. and Russia but also for Korea.'
More worrying for U.S. regional interests is Lee's attitude towards Japan, which he has repeatedly insisted should offer a more fulsome apology than the many already issued for abuses during its World War II occupation of the peninsula. Such sentiments sent relations between the neighbors calamitously spiraling during the Moon administration before ties were repaired under Yoon. 'We cannot dwell on the past,' says Lee. 'But Japan continues to deny its history and does not sincerely apologize, which hurts us Koreans.'
On a crisp May afternoon at Seoul's Songpanaru Park, Lee's 40-year-old presidential rival Lee Jun-seok gives a rousing speech to around 500 mostly male supporters who then line up to take selfies. 'We've had enough of the 'woke' agenda,' says supporter Lunar Kim, 24, as he watches from the crowd. Kim graduated from college two years ago yet has only just managed to find a job as an airport worker. 'Lee Jae-myung says he's for 'equality' but it's actually tilted for women and against men.'
Yoon's gossamer-thin victory in 2022 was owed in part by weaponizing anti­feminist rhetoric to gain support from disenfranchised young men, even vowing at the stump to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality (which he ultimately didn't). Despite Yoon's dramatic ouster, this misogynistic base remains galvanized by the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories on right-wing blogs and social media. South Koreans aged 18-30 face some of the worst relative poverty rates among OECD countries, and the perception among young men is that 18-month compulsory national service puts them at a marked disadvantage to their female peers, who are exempt.
At the same time, the World Economic Forum's 2024 Gender Gap Report ranks South Korea 94th out of 146 assessed nations worldwide. Kim Hyun-woo, a 20-year-old student at Ewha Womans University, laments the fact that this is the first South Korean presidential election in 18 years without a female candidate, despite women leading the charge for Yoon's impeachment. 'We must not forget the role of women in the square who helped bring about this early election,' she says, referring to the street demonstrations that accompanied the former President's ouster. 'I want people to remember who created the protest culture.'
Asked about gender equality, Lee again seeks the middle ground, insisting that 'efforts to improve women's rights must continue without fail,' while acknowledging 'a perception in Korean society that men are also subject to reverse discrimination.'
Ultimately, Lee knows he's in the catbird seat and is determined to keep his tent as open as possible—seeking not to alienate the progressives, centrists, nor even chauvinists. Supporters say this is the mark of a unifying candidate, though the fear remains that once voting is over, the old bitterness and acrimony will return without wholesale reform.
Since democratization, four South Korean Presidents have been imprisoned, one killed himself amid a corruption investigation, and three have been impeached. This lamentable record is spurring calls to amend the constitution from the current single five-year term to two terms, as well as perhaps holding parliamentary elections at the same time as presidential to avoid the executive and legislature being constantly at odds with each other.
'The day you get voted in is the day you become a lame duck,' says Naomi Chi, a professor focusing on the Korean Peninsula at Hokkaido University. 'I strongly believe that Korea should amend the Constitution to have two terms for the President. But people have an allergic reaction when anybody mentions such amendments.'
Lee is also in favor of constitutional reform, though a provision expressly prevents a sitting President from benefiting. It's set to be yet another divisive issue in a nation where political fissures have a sad history of turning violent. In 2006, future President Park Geun-hye suffered a knife attack that left her with a four-inch cut along her jaw that required 60 stitches. In 2015, then U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert was also slashed in the face. Solving a deep-seated culture of political animosity may be the biggest test Lee has faced in a lifetime of challenges overcome.
'The basic values that underpin democracy are all about recognizing the existence of the other,' says Lee. 'You can never say, 'I'm always right, you're always wrong.' My overarching principle is to meet, talk, and communicate.'
—With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul.
Write to Charlie Campbell at [e-mail].