In the wake of the Constitutional Court’s removal of Yoon Suk-yeol from the presidency on April 4, South Korea’s political parties have swiftly moved to elect their candidates for the snap presidential election scheduled on June 3.
Lee Jae-myung, the former leader of the main opposition Democratic Party who was also the contender against Yoon in the 2022 presidential election, is the frontrunner and is expected to be elected Yoon’s successor in June. According to polls, Lee is beating every possible candidate from the ruling People Power Party by more than 15 percentage points, showing his strong base of support.
There are only three candidates – including Lee, who left his post as DP leader on April 9 to prepare for the presidential race – who are running for the DP nomination. Given the circumstances, there is no possibility of the other candidate – Kim Dong-yeon, the governor of Gyeonggi Province and a former finance minister, and Kim Kyung-soo, a former legislator and South Gyeongsang Province governor who was convicted in an online opinion rigging scheme – winning the party’s primary election unless Lee voluntarily drops out of the race. Instead, their decisions to run are interpreted as a strategy to build up a base of support for a future presidential election, meaning their goal could be to become Lee’s successor (in South Korea, presidents are limited to a single five-year term).
On the other hand, there are 11 candidates who registered their candidacy for the primary election within the PPP. Although the snap presidential election is taking place due to Yoon’s impeachment over his martial law declaration, the party seems to have ironically been reinvigorated and is showing confidence that its candidate can defeat Lee, who has the so-called “judicial risk” due to pending legal cases against him.
Despite Yoon’s explicit violation of the constitution, the PPP has defended Yoon even after the Constitutional Court made an unanimous verdict to remove him from office. Unlike the party’s stance on Park Geun-hye – the conservative president before Yoon, who was removed from office on charges of bribery and abuse of power – the majority of lawmakers within the PPP are still relying on the influence of Yoon.
Some have suggested that the PPP should not field a candidate for the presidential election as a way to take political responsibility for the constitutional and political chaos the public had to experience in the past months. But the party shows no sign of accepting any blame for the events that have unfolded since December 3, 2024.
The PPP announced that it will elect its presidential candidate on May 3 after narrowing down the candidates to four and then two in the coming weeks. In this scenario, it is highly likely that most of the top four candidates would be those who pressured the Constitutional Court to dismiss Yoon’s impeachment case and justified Yoon’s decision to declare martial law on December 3. The PPP’s fundamental stance is that Yoon had no choice but to declare martial law due to the DP-controlled National Assembly’s ceaseless attempts to impeach Yoon’s Cabinet members. The Constitutional Court did not accept this claim but reiterated the severity of Yoon’s illegal decisions and orders for initiating martial law.
Surprisingly, the PPP’s approval rating is still hovering around 35 percent. For comparison, the party’s approval rating plummeted from the mid-30s to the low-10s following Park’s impeachment in December 2016. The PPP’s relatively high approval rating could be a reflection of anti-Lee sentiment among the conservatives, who are desperate to block Lee from becoming the next president. However, the relatively strong support could ironically be a bad sign for the party’s future, as it disincentivizes any soul-searching within the PPP.
Kim Moon-soo, the former labor minister and a hardline Yoon supporter, is a frontrunner among the PPP’s presidential candidates. Of the 11 candidates, only two – Han Dong-hoon, the former leader of the PPP and formerly Yoon’s right-hand man when both were working as prosecutors, and Ahn Cheol-soo, a senior lawmaker with a history of running as an independent – called for the PPP to impeach Yoon.
Considering Yoon’s strong base of support among the party members, Han and Ahn may face challenges to garner support from the current PPP members. This is the lesson that the majority of the PPP lawmakers learned in the wake of Park’s impeachment. Those who led Park’s impeachment and left the party in 2017 experienced political hardship. Labeled “betrayers,” many were defeated by pro-Park opponents in their party’s primary elections.
As a result, when the DP and other opposition parties moved to impeach Yoon following his declaration of martial law, the majority of the PPP lawmakers closed ranks around Yoon, likely to avoid accusations of “treason.” Among the 108 PPP lawmakers, only 12 supported the bill calling for impeaching Yoon on December 14. Those who publicly expressed their will to impeach Yoon were asked to leave the party by pro-Yoon lawmakers.
Despite Yoon’s removal from office, the party’s leadership actively defended Yoon during the Constitutional Court’s impeachment trial. The PPP lawmakers showed their confidence in that approach, demonstrating the party’s will not to draw a line between the PPP and Yoon – at least until the D-day of the snap presidential election.
There are voices within the PPP demanding that the party reform itself in order to overcome the public’s distrust over its capability to run the government. After all, the past two conservative presidents have been impeached and removed from office before completing their terms. However, the majority of the PPP lawmakers are relying on the influence of Yoon and his power within the party, which will be crucial for winning primary elections in the coming years.
Most conservatives hesitate to form a new conservative party due to the failure of the Bareun Party, launched by those who supported Park’s impeachment in 2017. Because the PPP’s base is the southeastern part of the country, where the constituents give unconditional support to PPP candidates, the conservatives who want to systematically change the party cannot succeed in carrying out their initiatives.
A rare exception is Lee Jun-seok, the former PPP leader who was ousted from the party’s leadership by pro-Yoon senior lawmakers. Lee formed the New Reform Party, which won three seats in the 2024 National Assembly election, and is running for president on the NRP ticket. Although Lee has ruled out the possibility of working with the PPP candidate to forge a unified conservative ticket, he will face immense pressure to accept the offer if there is no significant gap between his and the PPP candidate’s approval ratings and it appears that his candidacy could help Lee Jae-myung win the race. Lee Jun-seok’s current approval rating is around 14 percent when the pollster ask about a three-way race between candidates from the DP, PPP, and NRP.
Judging from the results of the previous elections, both the PPP and the DP candidates will earn at least 30 percent of votes in the upcoming snap elections – reflecting each party’s voting base. To win, however, they need to appeal to the 40 percent of voters who are centrist or undecided. The PPP’s problem is that the candidates most likely to win in its primary elections are the least likely to attract support from the general public.
As long as the PPP maintains its stance that Yoon’s martial law was entirely defensible and legal and continues defending the impeached president – who will be facing multiple charges in ongoing legal cases – the party will struggle to attract any voters beyond its base. That means its political future is very much in doubt.
Beyond the presidential election, local elections are scheduled in June 2026. If Lee Jae-myung becomes the president in June, the DP will likely win a landslide victory in the local polls – just as the PPP did in the 2022 local elections, conducted only three months after the 2022 presidential election. Already, the PPP has just 108 seats in the National Assembly, versus 170 held by the DP, meaning there is nothing it can do to block the Lee government’s initiatives in the legislature. The next general elections won’t be until 2028 – and there’s no guarantee the PPP will increase its seat count.
In light of the party leadership and Yoon’s actions even after his impeachment was decisively upheld, the PPP is on track to become a permanent minority in the National Assembly, whose support only comes from its traditional base. Without an effort to reshape the value of conservatism within the party, the PPP will be reduced to a group of far-right extremists.
