[Column] Korea must stop hate and the far right at the ballot box

Banners for the top four presidential candidates — Lee Jae-myung of the Democrats, Lee Jun-seok of the Reform Party, Kim Moon-soo of the People Power Party, and Kwon Young-gook of the Democratic Labor Party — hang alongside a road in Seoul’s Seongbuk District on May 22, 2025. (Yonhap)

By Shin Jin-wook, professor of sociology at Chung-Ang University

With just days to go before Korea’s presidential election, the main candidates’ position in the polls is in flux.

A recent meta-analysis of 188 presidential support polls by the Hankyoreh and polling organization STI found that Democratic Party candidate Lee Jae-myung’s lead over People Power Party (PPP) candidate Kim Moon-soo had decreased to the single digits (9.3 points).

According to a Realmeter poll for the fourth week of May, Kim Moon-soo’s support (38.6%) was within 10 points of Lee Jae-myung (48.1%), and the combined support for Kim Moon-soo and Reform Party candidate Lee Jun-seok was equivalent to Lee Jae-myung’s support. In a poll by Gallup Korea, Kim Moon-soo and Lee Jun-seok’s combined support exceeded that of Lee Jae-myung.

To be sure, we shouldn’t read too much into these since poll results vary widely. For example, Lee Jae-myung (46%) retains a considerable advantage over Kim Moon-soo (32%) in the National Barometer Survey, as well as in a poll by KBS-Hankook Research (49% to 34%). In some surveys with large samples, the gap between the two candidates is even greater.

But the notable thing is that many polls agree that Lee Jae-myung is shedding support while his conservative rivals are building momentum. While that’s not enough momentum to turn the tide, at least for now, this is admittedly a situation nobody expected just a few weeks ago.

These changes are no aberration. Rather, they represent a return to the structural divisions in Korean society that had been temporarily bridged by the Constitutional Court’s decision to remove former President Yoon Suk-yeol from office.

For several weeks after Yoon’s ill-fated declaration of martial law, the Korean public was decidedly in favor of his impeachment. But the balance abruptly narrowed at the beginning of the year, and for several months until the court’s ruling, polls generally showed Koreans supporting impeachment by a ratio of 60 to 35.

The 35% of the populace that opposed impeachment have now rallied and are being reinforced by voters who supported Yoon’s impeachment but are opposed to Lee Jae-myung and the Democratic Party, thus elevating Kim Moon-soo and Lee Jun-seok’s standing in the polls.

Simply put, the election may be the result of Yoon’s insurrection and subsequent impeachment, but the voting public cannot be neatly divided between support and opposition to impeachment, nor between sympathy and antipathy for insurrection.

Similar trends were observed in the 2017 presidential election, which was held after the impeachment of Park Geun-hye.

Even though 80% of the public had supported Park’s impeachment, progressive candidates Moon Jae-in and Sim Sang-jung had a combined vote share of 47.3%, which was actually less than that of conservative candidates Hong Joon-pyo, Ahn Cheol-soo and Yoo Seong-min (52.2%). In other words, Moon wasn’t elected president because Park’s impeachment had crushed the conservative movement, but because of a split in the conservative camp.

The Democratic Party entered this election cycle with an advantage because of the sheer shock of martial law, but growing disappointment, distrust and even disgust for Lee Jae-myung and the Democratic Party are driving voters back to their original allegiance.

If the Democratic Party had trusted the moderates and valued the diverse groups that took to the streets in support of Yoon’s impeachment, it could have maintained the groundswell of support for quashing the insurrection.

Given the major differences between the 2017 presidential election and this one, we shouldn’t downplay the fact that Kim Moon-soo and Lee Jun-seok are receiving as much support as past conservative candidates.

That election was won by Moon Jae-in, who adopted moderately progressive positions on such issues as labor, welfare and climate, while even Sim Sang-jung, a more staunchly progressive candidate, won over 6% of the vote. Some of the conservative candidates at the time represented the hard right, but none of them were clearly on the far right.

But Yoon’s martial law declaration and the subsequent debate over his impeachment have driven Korea’s political landscape much further to the right.

On one side is the Democratic Party, which is positioning itself on the center right, while on the other are the People Power Party and the Reform Party, which are identified with the far right. On the progressive side of things, Kwon Young-gook, candidate for the Democratic Labor Party (formerly Justice Party), only has the support of around 1% of voters.

The fact that conservative politics is lurching toward the far right is an extremely dangerous development in Korean society. Conservative politics has always reflected an anti-communist ideology dating back to the Cold War and included elements that were antithetical to democracy and human rights. But this time around, conservative voters as a whole are represented by Kim Moon-soo, who has close ties to Sarang Jeil Church pastor and political activist Jun Kwang-hoon, and Lee Jun-seok, who peddles the politics of hate. That’s qualitatively different from the past.

Kim Moon-soo and Lee Jun-seok have built influence by constantly creating new targets for hatred, such as supposed North Korean sympathizers, spies, anti-state forces, communists, feminists, Chinese agents, and disability activists. They can be seen as carrying on the legacy of the Yoon regime since they subscribe to the same sort of violent domination exemplified by Yoon’s martial law declaration.

It’s significant that such far-right forces receive significant public support and influence inside the PPP even after Korean society endured the horrific violence of the martial law declaration and military operations aimed at “rounding up” ideological opponents. In short, the tremendous effort expended after Yoon’s martial law stunt only succeeded at removing him from office without damaging the substructure in society that brought him to power; if anything, that substructure has grown in strength. Yoon may be gone, but Jun Kwang-hoon, Kim Moon-soo and Lee Jun-seok have taken his place.

It’s highly instructive that Kim Moon-soo is receiving upwards of 30% of public support as the PPP’s presidential candidate. Kim is a fellow traveler and close associate of Jun Kwang-hoon, who once boasted that he had shaped “half of Kim Moon-soo’s philosophy and ideology.”

Kim established the Liberal Unification Party in 2020 alongside Jun and was the party’s first leader. The party’s platform embraced the spirit of Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee, called for making Korea a Christian nation and vowed to stamp out “the juche faction’s culture of candlelit rallies” and support the “patriotic movement” in Gwanghwamun.

In an interview with the Chosun Monthly that March, Kim said the reason he’d left the Liberty Korea Party (forerunner of the PPP) was because it had “moved to the left.” Kim espoused radical right-wing convictions in the interview, disparaging moderate ideas as being “feel-good platitudes.”

But since Kim is now the PPP’s presidential candidate, he has effectively become a link between the two parties. Far-right forces that had once been on the fringe, with around 2% of support, managed to dramatically raise their political profile during the constitutional crisis and have now claimed the leadership of the PPP, one of Korea’s two major parties.

That change must be understood in a social climate in which a substantial number of the PPP’s members and supporters hold views that are largely the same as the Liberal Unification Party’s on such topics as justifying Yoon’s martial law and crediting conspiracy theories about liberals rigging elections and plotting to turn Korea into a communist country.

This election will serve to gauge the extent to which our society can deter the rise of these types of far-right political and social forces. 

#Column #Korea #stop #hate #ballot #box