Who is Lee Jae-Myung, the new president of South Korea?

Before the events of December 3, 2024, the new president of South Korea Lee Jae – Myung in power was strewn with obstacles.

Legal affairs underway, corruption surveys and power reduction allegations seemed ready to derail the second presidential candidacy of the former opposition chief.

Then a constitutional crisis has changed everything.

That night, the aborted attempt by former president Yoon Suk Yeol to invoke martial law sparked a series of events that have crossed the way to Lee.

Exactly six months later, the South Koreans presented a victory to the candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party who made his way to a factory teenager at the country’s most powerful office.

Lee had been planned to win in the perspective of the elections, and his last obstacle disappeared after the candidate of the ruling party conceded in the early hours of the morning after election day.

A story of origin of the rags with the rich combined with a Haussier political style made Lee a figure of division in South Korea.

“The life of Lee Jae-Myung has been full of ups and downs, and he often takes actions that arouse controversy,” the professor of political science and international studies at the National University of Incheon, BBC.

These actions generally included attempts at progressive reform – as a commitment, made during its presidential campaign in 2022, to implement a regime of universal basic income – which disputed the power structure and the existing status quo in South Korea.

“For this reason, some people support it strongly, while others are wary or do not like it,” said Dr. Lee. “It is a very controversial and unconventional figure – really a foreigner that has made a name in a way that does not correspond to the traditional standards of the Democratic Party.”

But in this campaign, he got closer to the center, focusing on large companies and stressing the importance of links with the United States, before trade negotiations with President Donand Trump.

In a recent memory, Lee described his childhood as “miserable”.

Born in 1963 in a mountain village in Andong, the province of Gyeongbuk, he was the fifth of the five sons and two daughters, and – due to the difficult circumstances of his family – jumped the college to enter the labor market illegally.

As a young factory worker, Lee suffered an industrial accident where his fingers found themselves caught in a factory power belt and at the age of 13 underwent a permanent injury to his arm after his wrist was crushed by a press machine.

Lee then asked and was authorized to take entry exams for the school and the university, passing respectively in 1978 and 1980. He then studied the law with a full scholarship and succeeded in the bar exam in 1986.

In 1992, he married his wife Kim Hye-Kyung, with whom he had two children.

He worked as a human rights lawyer for almost two decades before entering politics in 2005, joining the Uri Social-Liberal Party, a predecessor of the Democratic Party of Korea and the ruling party at the time.

While his poor education has attracted the contempt of members of the upper class of South Korea, the success of Lee in the construction of his political career from zero has earned him the support of working class voters and those who feel deprived of their rights by the political elite.

He was elected mayor of Seongnam in 2010, deploying a series of free social protection policies during his mandate, and in 2018 became governor of the broader province of Gyeonggi.

Lee was going to be acclaimed for his response to the Pandemic Covid-19, during which he faced himself with the central government because of his insistence to provide universal rescue subsidies to all residents of the province.

It was also during this period that Lee became the last presidential candidate of the Democratic Party for the first time in October 2021 – losing 0.76 percentage points. Less than a year later, in August 2022, he was elected the party leader.

From that moment, said Dr. Lee, Lee took over the controversial approach and fire for the fire for which he had become notorious – opting rather to play safely and keep a low profile.

“After the term (of Lee) as governor, his reformist image was somewhat when he focused more on his presidential ambitions,” he said. “However, on certain questions – as tackling past wrongs (during the Japanese colonial era), well -being and corruption – he built a faithful and passionate support base by taking a firm and uncompromising position.”

This without compromise attitude has its detractors, with many members and supporters of the Party Power Party (PPP) in power considering Lee as aggressive and abrasive in his approach.

Lee’s political career was also spoiled by a series of scandals – including a driving incident in 2004, disputes with parents in the late 2010s and allegations of an extramarital case that emerged in 2018.

While in other parts of the world, voters have shown forgiveness and even support for controversial politicians, in South Korea – a country that is still relatively conservative in what it expects from public characters – such scandals have not played well.

In recent years, Lee’s political ambitions have been struggling with even more urgent controversies – including current legal affairs that continue to hang it, threatening to be hamstrings if not scuttle his career.

One of them concerned a series of high -level accusations, in particular corruption, corruption and violation of confidence, associated with a land development project in 2023.

Another, perhaps more critical legal battle involved allegations that Lee made a knowingly false statement during a debate in the last presidential campaign.

During the debate, which was broadcast on South Korean television in December 2021, Lee denied personally knowing that Kim Moon-Ki, a key figure in a corruption land development scandal which had committed suicide a few days earlier.

The prosecutors alleged that the complaint was false, thus violating the law on the election of civil servants and, in November 2024, Lee was found guilty of the accusation of false declarations and was sentenced to a year in suspended prison.

Then, in March, a court of appeal erased him from the accusations – only for this decision to be canceled by the Supreme Court of South Korea. At the time of writing, the case is still awaiting a verdict.

Other threats against the future political ambitions of Lee have represented a darker danger.

In January 2024, while answering journalists’ questions outside the construction site of an airport planned in Busan, Lee was stabbed in the neck by a man who had approached him to ask him for an autograph.

Lee’s jugular vein’s injury, although requiring in-depth surgery, was not critical-but he campaigned for this election behind a bullet-proof glass, wearing a bulletproof vest, surrounded by agents carrying ballistic malformations.

The attacker, who had written an eight -page manifesto and wanted to make sure that Lee never became president, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The attack has raised concerns about the deepening of political polarization in South Korea, perhaps most publicly embodied in the red rivalry between Lee and Yoon, and more private in the increasingly extreme online speech of the country.

In December 2023, just a few weeks before Lee’s attack, an investigation sponsored by the Hankyoreh newspaper found that more than 50% of respondents said they thought that the political fracture of South Korea was aggravated.

Some say that as the leader of the Democratic Party, Lee played a major role in feeding the problem, frequently blocking queries from the Yoon government and making him effectively a lame fork president.

Such a constant clandestinity of the Democratic Party has only made Yoon’s leadership struggles – which also included attempts at repeated indictment against administration officials and constant opposition to its budget.

Finally, while the pressure against him rose, the former president took the drastic measure of the declaration of martial law.

The declaration of martial law of Yoon on December 3 – made in an self -proclaimed attempt to eliminate the “anti -state forces” and the sympathizers of North Korea – served as a catalyst in Lee to emerge as a leading presidential candidate.

In the hours following the declaration, Lee called on the public via a live broadcast program and urged them to meet in protest outside the National Assembly building in the center of Seoul.

Thousands of people responded, competing with the police and blocking the military units while the opposition legislators rushed into the assembly building, climbing on fences and walls in a desperate attempt to block the order of Yoon.

Lee was among them, climbing above the fence to enter the National Assembly and helping to adopt the resolution to raise martial law.

The Democratic Party later decided to dismiss President Yoon – a decision which was unanimously confirmed by the Constitutional Court of South Korea on April 4, 2025.

It was then that Lee started the way to a full -fledged electoral offer, announcing his resignation as leader of the Democratic Party on April 9 before his presidential race. In the presidential primary of the Democratic Party held on April 27, he was selected as a general candidate with overwhelming support.

The result of the attempt at Yoon aborted martial law was a political maelstrom from which South Korea is still in shock: a constitutional crisis which ended the career of the former president and left his PPP en lambaaux.

But among the little ones who managed to take advantage of this chaos to their advantage, none have benefited more than Lee.

He is now president of South Korea, but his future before the courts has not yet been decided.

They agreed to postpone their legal audiences until after the elections, which means that he could be sentenced during his mandate.

And this could mean that South Korea, which has just undergone a period of one month’s political disorders, may not be done with upheavals for the moment.