South Koreans head to the polls to pick a new president on Tuesday, with the liberal front-runner, Lee Jae-myung, projected to sail to victory — a win that could shake up ties with Japan and the United States and kick-start dialogue with nuclear-armed North Korea.
Barring an unforeseen development, a Lee victory seems all but certain. The Democratic Party (DP) candidate, who lost by a razor-thin margin to Yoon Suk Yeol in the 2022 election, held a commanding lead in final opinion polling, with 49% support against 35% for his closest rival, Kim Moon-soo of the People Power Party, a Gallup Korea survey showed last Tuesday.
While Kim has eroded a more than 20 percentage point gap with Lee at the start of the campaign on May 12, he failed to convince another candidate, the Reform Party's Lee Jun-seok, to drop out and back him to avoid splitting the conservative vote.
That, coupled with Lee Jae-myung’s major effort to recast himself from a leftwing populist into a more palatable figure for moderate swing voters — a move widely referred to in South Korean slang as “right-clicking” — has all but assured his ascendance to his country’s highest office.
A defining feature of this attempt at recasting his image and that of the DP has been his positive remarks about the U.S. alliance and the need for continued cooperation with neighboring Japan.
However, some observers say that many South Koreans remain skeptical that Lee has done enough to separate himself from what they say is his party's leftist-nationalist reputation and its history of anti-American, anti-Japan and pro-China rhetoric.
“If Lee can continue to distance himself from the DP's past association with more radical views, it should help him secure an electoral victory,” said Evans Revere, a former U.S. State Department official who worked extensively on Korean Peninsula issues. “Meanwhile, Kim Moon-soo is running out of time and opportunity to make his case to voters, many of whom see the PPP as tainted by its association with the impeached former President Yoon.”
Lee's Japan 'pragmatism'
Lee has played down his earlier hard-line views on South Korea’s tumultuous relationship with Japan, hinting that he would not take an antagonistic approach to ties if elected and wouldn’t reverse the agreements that led to a thaw in ties under Yoon.
“There is a preconception that I am hostile toward Japan,” Lee said earlier this month. “Japan is a neighboring country, and we must cooperate with each other to create synergy.”
But Lee’s past positions on Japan speak for themselves.
While Yoon worked during his term to improve the relationship after it plummeted in 2018 to its lowest point in years over wartime history and other issues, Lee argued that Japan had still not properly atoned for its 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula and lashed out at trilateral U.S.-South Korea-Japan military cooperation, calling it “pro-Japanese.”
Although Lee has since dismissed concerns that he would reverse the ousted Yoon’s Japan policies and limit trilateral cooperation with Japan and the U.S., the DP candidate has also emphasized that Seoul cannot back down from festering historical grievances, including the issues of compensation for Korean wartime laborers at Japanese factories and mines before and during World War II.
Tokyo’s stance is that all such claims were settled “completely and finally” under a 1965 agreement that normalized bilateral ties and saw Japan pay $500 million to South Korea.
Japanese officials have been watching closely for any signals of a potential shift in Seoul’s agreement to resolve the wartime labor issue via a third-party payment system or to again broach the issue of “comfort women,” a euphemism for those who suffered under Japan’s wartime military brothel system.
Lee, for his part, has emphasized “pragmatism” and open-mindedness during the presidential campaign, and his advisers include a number of well-known moderates.
“But it is important to remember that the DP's original articles of impeachment against former President Yoon included language deeply critical of his policy toward Japan,” Revere said. The motion referenced Yoon’s “bizarre Japan-centered” policy and alleged that he had appointed “pro-Japan” figures to key government posts.
That language was deleted in the motion that later passed the National Assembly.
“Lee may not actively walk back Yoon’s reconciliation with Japan or abandon the forced labor resolution as (former South Korean President) Moon Jae-in abrogated the comfort woman agreement,” said Bruce Klingner, the senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at the Heritage Foundation. “But Lee and his party will react more strongly to any perceived slight from Japan over history issues.”
Although cooperation with Japan may be a begrudging affair under a DP-led government, Ramon Pacheco Pardo, an expert on the two Koreas and a professor at King's College London, pointed out that Lee would surely be cognizant of the large share of South Koreans who support such cooperation and the growing number who also have positive views of their neighbor.
Nearly 42% of South Koreans have a favorable impression of Japan, marking the highest level ever, according to an annual survey released last September by the East Asia Institute, an independent Seoul-based think tank.
“So I think that Lee would try to avoid any reopening of the (wartime labor) agreement from affecting relations,” he said.
Whatever the case, Lee’s stance on a more cooperative relationship would be indicative of his choices going forward.
“It seems likely that policy towards Japan and trilateral cooperation with Washington and Tokyo will be a key issue for Lee and his government early on and a bellwether of other policy decisions to come,” Revere said.
A pivot on the U.S.
When it comes to Seoul’s relationship with Washington, the DP — and Lee in particular — has “increasingly framed the alliance not as an ideological liability but as a pragmatic platform for safeguarding South Korea’s security, prosperity, and global influence,” Darcie Draudt-Vejares, an expert on the Koreas at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in an analysis Thursday.
Indeed, Lee has taken to praising the U.S. alliance, even lauding South Korean-based American forces for playing “a very important critical role for the United States policy of containment against China” — comments seen as a potentially massive shift considering the DP’s strong, long-standing views on South Korean sovereignty and the need for closer ties with Beijing.
Some, however, wonder if Lee's pivot will last, and how his views might clash with U.S. President Donald Trump, who has slapped South Korea with onerous tariffs and demanded that Seoul cough up more cash for hosting some 28,500 U.S. troops.
Revere said that a DP-led government will still probably have skeptical views about the United States, the alliance and military basing issues, as well as a strong strain of anti-Japan sentiment.
“On most of these issues, there is potential for the Republic of Korea and the United States — now led by a president who has been vocally critical of both South Korea and of the value of the U.S.-ROK alliance — to increasingly find themselves at odds in the months to come,” he said, using the formal name for South Korea.
Still, one area could prove to be low-hanging fruit for any Lee government’s dealings with Trump: North Korea.
Lee has noted Trump’s interest in rekindling summit diplomacy with North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un after three earlier meetings during his first White House stint, saying during a campaign stop earlier this month that “South Korea should help” facilitate such a meeting.
The DP has already laid the groundwork for appealing to Trump’s ego by filing paperwork recommending that the Norwegian Nobel Committee consider nominating the U.S. leader for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his “promotion of peace on the Korean Peninsula.”
“Perhaps the one area where Seoul and Washington might find themselves on the same page would be North Korea, where Donald Trump's continued interest in resuscitating his ‘bromance’ with Kim Jong Un is likely to be viewed sympathetically by a DP-led South Korean government,” Revere said.
“However, with hopes for the denuclearization of North Korea now all but dead, the U.S. under Donald Trump could seek to change the focus of talks with Pyongyang to other issues — including arms control, a freeze on long-range ballistic missile testing, the reduction of large-scale military exercises and even changes to the deployment of U.S. forces — that would have major, negative implications for the security of South Korea and Japan.”
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