SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - South Korea's governing party handed its leadership on Monday to the man who served as President Lee Jae Myung's first prime minister, giving the president's closest political partner control of the party machine three days after his approval rating fell to the lowest level of his term.
Kim Min-seok took 54.08 percent of the vote at the Democratic Party of Korea's national convention in Daejeon, defeating the incumbent leader, Jung Chung-rae, who finished with 45.92 percent. He becomes the second party leader to serve under Lee's government.
No candidate cleared a majority on the first count. Voters had ranked the three contenders in order of preference, and when the first tally came up short, the second choices of those who had placed Song Young-gil at the top were added to the totals of the other two. Song finished third.
Votes cast by delegates and dues-paying members carried 70 percent of the weight in the result, with a public opinion survey accounting for the remaining 30 percent. The party applied a one-member-one-vote rule for the first time.
The new leadership serves a two-year term and will control candidate nominations for the 2028 general election, which makes the post one of the most powerful in the governing camp.
Kim told the convention he would rebuild the party around a plan he labeled ABC. A stands for affordability, which he described as politics organized around the cost of living. B stands for broad, meaning a party that adds rather than subtracts. C stands for competence.
"Our language, our policies, our attitude and our culture will all evolve," he said.
He also set out how he intends to handle the party's dealings with the presidential office, promising what he called a creative horizontal relationship of full cooperation in which the party works for the president's success rather than against it.
In his final appeal to delegates before the vote, Kim had put the case for his candidacy in blunter terms, saying the campaign was driven by fear "that the Democratic Party will be shaken, that the government will be shaken, that relations between the party and the government will be shaken, that President Lee Jae Myung will be shaken."
The numbers behind that anxiety had landed the previous Friday. Gallup Korea found that 44 percent of respondents approved of Lee's performance in a survey conducted from Aug. 11 to 13, against 46 percent who disapproved. It was the first time disapproval had run ahead of approval since he took office last year. Three weeks earlier, approval had stood at 51 percent.
The leadership race itself grew out of the June 3 local elections. The Democratic Party of Korea won 12 metropolitan mayor and governor posts against four for the opposition People Power Party, but it lost Seoul to Oh Se-hoon, and lawmakers began blaming Jung publicly for that defeat within a day of the count.
Kim, 62, opened his speech by counting 40 years back to the start of his public life, when he was elected student council president at Seoul National University at the age of 20 and joined the campaign demanding an accounting for the military crackdown in Gwangju in May 1980. He served prison time for organizing protests against the government of Chun Doo-hwan.
He has represented the Yeongdeungpo-B district of Seoul across four terms in the National Assembly, split by an 18-year absence. He first won the seat in 1996 at 32, the youngest member of that assembly, and returned to parliament only in 2020 after losing the Seoul mayoral race in 2002. In 2000, he served as chief of staff to Kim Dae-jung in the late president's separate capacity as leader of the governing party, and he has since held the posts of supreme council member, policy committee chairman, and head of the Democratic Research Institute.
Lee named him prime minister in July 2025. He left office at the end of June to enter the leadership race, and Han Seong-sook, the former Naver chief executive, replaced him on July 1.
The council Kim will chair, however, was shaped by the camp he beat. Choi Min-hee finished first among the five elected supreme council members, taking the senior seat, followed by Park Sun-won, Suh Mi-hwa, Lee Sung-yoon and Han Min-soo. Choi, Lee and Han had campaigned under the banner of Team Jung Chung-rae.
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