Updated June 3, 2025 at 7:12 PM PDT
SEOUL, South Korea — Lee Jae-myung, leader of South Korea's main liberal party, has won the country's presidential election, following months of political turmoil after the last president was impeached.
Election officials have yet to release the final vote tally, but conservative candidate Kim Moon-soo, of the People Power Party, conceded the race in the early hours of Wednesday local time. Exit polls from South Korean media had shown Lee would win.
In a short statement before Kim's concession, Lee thanked voters and expressed his respect for "the people's great decision." Later, in a victory speech in the early hours of Wednesday, Lee vowed to restore democracy after a tumultuous few months. Former President Yoon Suk Yeol was removed from office in April after lawmakers impeached him for trying to declare martial law last December.
"I will fulfill my mission of creating a world where democracy is restored and the people are respected as sovereign in a democratic republic while living together in cooperation with each other," Lee said on a stage where he was joined by his wife, Kim Hye-kyung.
"The moment I am confirmed as the president-elect, I will put all of my strength into reviving the economy and recovering people's livelihoods," he added.
On foreign policy, Lee said that he will seek dialogue and a path for co-prosperity with neighboring North Korea — a notable departure from the outgoing conservative administration.
But he has also vowed to strengthen South Korea's alliance with the United States and continue the trilateral security cooperation with Japan launched under the previous administration.
Because this is a snap election, there will be no transition period. Lee will take office immediately after completing the necessary formalities.
Lee's victory marks a dramatic chapter both in the past few months' political upheaval in South Korea and in his personal life. Born in a poor family, Lee worked at sweatshops after finishing only elementary school before he became a human rights lawyer, a mayor, a governor and then the leader of the Democratic Party of Korea.
But Lee will have little time for celebration.
South Korea's economy shrank in the past year and is expected to face further headwinds amid President Trump's tariff threats. Lee will take office Wednesday and the new administration will have only about a month to reach a deal in the ongoing tariff negotiations before the 90-day pause ends.
The new administration in Seoul will also have to navigate mounting geopolitical uncertainties, with North Korea growing closer with Russia.
Domestically, the intense confrontation both in the South Korean Parliament and among the public over the former president Yoon's martial law declaration has aggravated the country's political polarization and shaken South Koreans' confidence in their democracy.
New president to face deeply polarized country
Both of the leading candidates from the two major parties pledged to unite the nation. But they each represented South Korea's deepening division themselves.
Lee clashed with President Yoon's government as leader of the opposition, after closely losing to Yoon in the 2022 presidential election. Yoon vetoed a record number of bills passed by the opposition-controlled parliament, and Lee's party impeached a series of government officials.
After Yoon declared martial law in December, Lee led his party in overturning it and eventually impeaching Yoon.
He has called this election "a decision between a return of insurrectionists and a rebirth into a new democratic republic."
His rival Kim, who served as Yoon's labor minister, has opposed the former president's impeachment and resisted calls to cut ties with him.
In an emergency parliamentary session in December, when an opposition lawmaker demanded that Yoon's Cabinet members apologize to the nation over the martial law declaration, Kim was the only one who refused to stand up and bow down.
Conservative voters' support for Kim as their presidential candidate has since soared, even as his popularity among the general public in early polls lagged behind other aspiring conservative candidates who were more critical of Yoon.
"Emotional polarization" grips South Korean public, analysts say
"South Korean society became increasingly polarized through the three years of the Yoon administration and the five years of the previous administration," Heo Jinjae, the research director of public opinion analysis at Gallup Korea, said at a recent news conference.
In 2016, South Korea impeached another conservative president over charges of corruption and bribery.
Nearly half of the governing party lawmakers voted to impeach President Park Geun-hye then. But this time, just over 10% did, "even as the reasons for Yoon Suk Yeol's impeachment were much more serious than Park Geun-hye's," says Ha Shang Eung, a political scientist at Sogang University in Seoul.
The public was also less united this time. Around 80% of South Koreans supported Park's impeachment, according to polls, but only around 60% wanted to impeach Yoon.
And the president's supporters reacted more aggressively this time. In January, when a court issued an arrest warrant for Yoon, more than 100 of his supporters smashed the court's windows and stormed inside.
Experts say South Korea's polarization is more emotional than ideological.
"It's not a matter of positions on an issue or a policy. People just hate the other side. It's an emotional polarization. So it becomes a clash between us versus them, the good versus the bad," says politics professor Yoo Sung-jin of Ewha Womans University in Seoul.
In a post-election survey by Gallup Korea in 2022, "resentment of the other candidate" was among the top reasons voters chose one of the two main candidates.
Yoo says political parties have increasingly relied on harsher rhetoric and extreme positions to appeal to more hard-line supporters.
On the campaign trail, the conservative candidate Kim has echoed the impeached president's accusations of the opposition as "pro-communist," saying he will "punish" them for "trying to turn this great democratic country into something worse than Hitler, Kim Jong Un, Stalin, and Xi Jinping's country."
Yoon's staunch followers have also repeated his unfounded allegations of election fraud and judicial bias.
Meanwhile, South Koreans' trust in democracy has declined.
In a recent survey by the Seoul-based think tank East Asia Institute, over 30% of people expressed doubts about election fairness. And among supporters of the governing party, 30% said dictatorship can be better than democracy.
Favorite faces questions over policies, earlier accusations
Since the presidential campaign began, the Democratic Party candidate Lee has tried to woo more moderate voters, stressing pragmatism and national interest. He even said that his party is a "center-right party."
He has also vowed to advance South Korea's alliance with the United States and continue its trilateral cooperation with Japan, appearing to soothe conservative voters' concerns about his foreign and security policy positions.
At the same time, he has distanced himself from a more progressive agenda, such as enacting an anti-discrimination bill and amending the rape law to include nonconsensual sex.
But if he is elected as expected, it remains to be seen whether his rightward policy shifts will help bridge the emotional gap with his fiercest critics.
In a recent poll, a majority of respondents said they find Lee "unlikeable." The response was particularly strong among young men and older voters — groups that have supported the impeached president the most.
Lee also has unresolved questions about several court trials he is facing over charges of corruption and election law violations, which he has claimed are politically motivated.
And if elected, he would need to confront these challenges quickly. The president-elect of this snap election immediately assumes the position, with a simplified inauguration ceremony and no transition period.
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