On October 19, Gyeonggi, South Korea’s most populous province, held a post-funeral ceremony ahead of a firefighter’s internment. More than 2,700 people filled the indoor stadium. Choo Mi-ae, the provincial governor, stood on the green sports surfacing, tears streaming down her face. File after file of uniformed firefighters weaved around her amid dirgeful tributes.
Of course, the firefighter’s burial signified the loss and sacrifice of a serviceman who braved a conflagration to save lives. Yet, it also rang the death knell for the ruling Democratic Party’s approval ratings.
The same day, Realmeter, an authoritative pollster, released a poll. The DP’s approval rating, at 36.2 percent, was lower than the opposition People Power Party’s 40.9 percent. It was the first time since the June local elections that the PPP had outpolled than the DP.
The alienation of DP supporters happened fast. Less than five months ago, the June local elections handed the DP a resounding victory. Since then, the DP has registered a double-digit plunge in approval ratings.
The party’s fall was particularly steep in Seoul, with the DP polling at 26.7 percent as opposed to the PPP’s 45.7 percent. One-fifth of South Koreans live in Seoul; track records in the capital thus tend to reflect where the swing voters stand. Oh Se-hoon, its current mayor, may lose the post should the Supreme Court uphold the special counsel’s charge that Oh allegedly paid a pollster to rig polls in his favor. (On October 23, the appellate court overturned his guilty verdict. The Supreme Court will rule on the case early next year.) The DP hopes to retake Seoul in a potential by-election, but with these poll numbers success is far from assured.
The DP’s popularity may still crater further. Given the touchy nature of the reform agenda still ahead for the Lee Jae-myung administration, the rest of this year and next year may not really be a rosy picture for the party. And then it will already be time for the 2028 general elections.
The party’s poor polling performance is of its own making, though. Choo, the governor of Gyeonggi-do, dealt the most immediate damage in a controversy that preceded the firefighter’s funeral
On October 13, during a parliamentary audit, Choo said that “firefighting is like a financial straw, causing the biggest headache.” She then elaborated on how much firefighters are setting back the province’s coffers. Firefighters’ unions went up in arms, wondering how the sacrifice of constantly putting their lives in jeopardy could be reduced to a budgetary complaint.
Choo ignored their calls for an apology. The province explained that her remark was in reference to the ballooning budgetary burden on the local government due to decreasing financial contributions from the central government – even though the firefighters are directly employed by the central government. Despite her true intention, Choo’s phrasing was no doubt inappropriate and hurtful. She was already facing steep criticism. Then October 16 changed everything.
A fire erupted in a metal printing factory in a town in Gyeonggi. Flames engulfed firefighter Kim Jin-seok, who passed away in the line of duty. The nation became even more infuriated with Choo’s callous analogy earlier.
The next day, Choo attended Kim’s funeral, where she finally apologized: “Since you want an apology, I wholeheartedly apologize.” You have to want to apologize for an apology to feel sincere. But she made it clear she was forced. Her apology duly backfired, to the point where she might have been better off not apologizing at all.
Making matters worse, when Kim Min-seok, the DP’s leader, arrived at the funeral his car parked in a spot reserved for emergency patients. It was a collective PR disaster for the party.
Choo has also been stirring the pot within the DP. She openly clashed with President Lee Jae-myung on the latter’s choice for head of the Serious Crime Investigation Agency (SCIA). It’s a new institution born out of abolishing the prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor’s office used to wield unchecked political powers through its dual authority to investigate and indict. Lee’s criminal justice reform and the DP’s legislation kiboshed this practice by distributing investigatory powers to the police and the SCIA, and indictment authority to the Prosecution Service, also a new body.
In September, when Lee picked Kim Ji-yong, a former prosecutor, to lead the SCIA, Choo maligned Lee by wondering out loud, “Why is he shivering before the insurrection forces?” Kim Yong-min, a popular hard-line DP legislator, joined forces with Choo. They believe Kim Ji-yong huddled around former President Yoon Suk-yeol when Yoon was chief prosecutor and that appointing Kim means giving in to the prosecutors and insurrection forces that aided and protected Yoon for his authoritarian practices and failed self-coup. For his part, Lee maintains that Kim was anti-Yoon.
Their public disagreement continued into this month. “Why appoint someone who can turn their back to the people and justice as the captain of our reform ship?” Choo wrote on October 2. On the same day, Kim Yong-min held a press conference publicly denouncing Kim Ji-yong for having always opposed prosecutorial reform. Meanwhile, Lee made repeated social media posts and a parliamentary submission arguing that the nominee had appropriate qualities needed to establish a trustworthy criminal justice system.
Voices in and out of the DP expressed concerns that such open defiance seemed to challenge Lee’s authority over personnel. The spat peaked in rhetoric on October 9, when Lee made a social media post maligning “those incompetents … who stage internal attacks purportedly for radical reform as a noble cause” when in fact they were complaining because “personnel and national policy didn’t go the way they wanted.”
Separately, the president’s online spat with Cho Kuk, a former justice minister who founded the Rebuilding Korea Party (RKP), further fractured the support for the DP. With 12 legislators in the National Assembly, Cho’s RKP is the third largest party after the DP and the PPP. Cho is also frequently mentioned as a strong contender for the next presidency. The RKP collaborated with the DP to boost liberal voters’ turnout during the 2024 April general elections.
The DP-RKP alliance became uncomfortable in June, however. When Cho ran for a parliamentary by-election, the DP fielded a candidate of its own – a choice many questioned. Liberal votes naturally split, and the PPP easily nabbed the seat.
Ever since, talk of merging the two parties has become fraught with grudges. Cho and Lee have also exchanged criticisms over each other’s stance on the extent of prosecutorial reform. Lee must have targeted Cho as well when he wrote on October 5 that his detractors “shouldn’t try to influence personnel choices and specific affairs of investigation and indictment in the name of prosecutorial reform and for selfish reasons.” (Cho and his wife served prison time after the prosecutors dug every dirt on them to stem former President Moon Jae-in’s and Cho’s effort to curtail the prosecutor’s office’s undue investigative and political powers.) Cho retorted that “the sense of crisis over the dissolution of our alliance has reached the boiling point.”
The past couple of months has seen Lee devoting a large portion of his time and energy to putting in place vociferous elements within the liberal camp. There are two reasons the president rolled up his sleeves to personally engage with critics.
First, Lee must be feeling isolated and betrayed. In September, he shared someone else’s post: “What hurts more are words from within than foes from without … In this chess game, we need to protect the queen that is Lee Jae-myung.” Second, Kim Min-seok, the DP leader who had Lee’s support in the August chair election, has failed to set the party’s house in order. He is kind and voluble but ineffective in quelling the internal unrest. His frequent warnings against those critical of Lee have fallen flat.
While the DP’s big shots are preoccupied with aggrandizing their own presence, the RPK’s support rating reached 9 percent, its highest since the onset of the Lee administration, according to the October 22 figures released by Media Tomato, another major pollster. On the one hand, it indicates the degree to which the DP let down even its core supporters. On the other hand, at least the overall support for the liberal bloc is still more robust than for the PPP. The most pressing thing would be learning how to coalesce at critical moments.
