SEOUL, September 14 (AJP) - President Lee Jae Myung is facing a sharp erosion of support among young South Koreans, with controversies surrounding former Gender Equality and Family Minister nominee Yong Hye-in and Justice Minister nominee Kim Seung-won turning questions of fairness into a political liability for the administration’s second Cabinet reshuffle.
A Realmeter survey released Monday showed Lee’s approval rating among respondents aged 18 to 29 at just 18.6 percent, down 10.2 percentage points from the previous week. Support stood at 19.6 percent among young men and an even lower 17.6 percent among young women.
The same polling series showed the ruling Democratic Party, or DP, at 36.1 percent nationwide, while the main opposition People Power Party, or PPP, rose to 42.1 percent. Among voters in their 20s, the contrast was far more dramatic: the DP drew 15.0 percent, compared with 61.5 percent for the PPP.
“I’m very worried,” DP lawmaker Jeon Yong-gi told AJP when asked about the numbers.
The slide has unfolded as Lee’s second round of Cabinet nominations became engulfed in disputes over whether politicians who have built careers around reform and fairness have themselves benefited from political privilege.
Yong, a 1990-born Basic Income Party lawmaker who had been tapped to head the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, withdrew her nomination Sunday after days of controversy over her plan to retain her proportional-representation National Assembly seat while serving as a Cabinet minister.
She also faced allegations that her small party had effectively become a family-run political organization, including criticism over her husband’s senior party role, government-backed employment subsidies received by the party and questions over its organizational practices. Yong rejected accusations of improper favoritism, arguing that her husband’s appointment followed party procedures and that retaining a parliamentary seat while serving in the Cabinet was permitted by law.
For many critics, however, the dispute landed on particularly sensitive terrain for younger voters: whether people with political connections are playing by the same rules as everyone else.
“The decline in the president’s job approval and the rise in PPP support can largely be attributed to the Lee Jae Myung administration’s failed vetting of ministerial nominees, regulation-centered housing policies that run counter to what the public wants, and a worsening economy that people can actually feel,” PPP lawmaker Lee Hun-seung told AJP.
“Yong Hye-in has stepped down as gender equality minister nominee, but allegations of hypocrisy and double standards surrounding Justice Minister nominee Kim Seung-won continue to emerge,” Lee said. “With loan restrictions pushing up housing costs while making home ownership even harder, the sense of frustration among young people could only further damage support for the Lee administration.”
Kim, a DP lawmaker nominated to lead the Justice Ministry, has been confronted with several separate controversies.
The opposition has alleged that Kim improperly pressed the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety in 2021 over approval for a COVID-19 treatment clinical trial involving biotech firm Genencell. Kim has said he simply relayed a public grievance and asked regulators to conduct a fair review, denying that he sought guaranteed approval or knew that problems had been alleged with animal-test data.
The controversy widened after reports of suspected unfair stock trading involving people connected to companies around Genencell. Those allegations do not in themselves establish that Kim participated in stock manipulation, and Kim and the DP have rejected attempts to tie him directly to such trading.
Questions of fairness also arose over a social cooperative run by Kim’s wife that provides services to children with developmental disabilities. PPP lawmakers alleged that the organization employed two of the couple’s children after beginning to receive government-funded voucher revenue, raising questions about preferential hiring. Kim’s confirmation team rejected the accusations, saying both children performed genuine education and care work for which they were qualified and were paid accordingly.
“The hypocrisy and unfairness Yong Hye-in displayed, together with the abolition of prosecutors’ supplementary investigative powers, shattered the illusion among women in their 20s and 30s that Lee Jae Myung was doing a good job,” PPP lawmaker Yoo Sang-bum told AJP.
“The hollowness of what the DP calls reform is being exposed, and its support is plunging,” Yoo said. “With no alternative other than the People Power Party, the PPP is benefiting almost by default.”
The reference to supplementary investigations points to another issue that has generated unease among some younger women.
The DP pushed through an amendment to the Criminal Procedure Act eliminating prosecutors’ authority to directly conduct supplementary investigations while strengthening their power to order police to conduct additional investigative work. The measure was promulgated in August and is scheduled to take effect Oct. 2 as part of a broader restructuring designed to separate investigation from prosecution.
Supporters say the change is essential to ending decades of excessive prosecutorial power. Critics, however, have argued that removing a second layer of investigation could hurt crime victims when police investigations are inadequate.
The Women’s Party staged a protest in August arguing that the change ignored victims of violence against women. Victims of serious crimes, including the woman attacked in the widely known Busan roundhouse-kick case, have also publicly opposed abolishing prosecutors’ supplementary investigation authority.
That debate is politically significant because young women have been among the DP and Lee’s most important sources of support in recent national elections.
In the 2022 presidential election, a joint exit poll by South Korea’s three major terrestrial broadcasters found that 58.0 percent of women in their 20s supported Lee, then the DP presidential candidate, compared with 33.8 percent for conservative Yoon Suk Yeol.
The pattern strengthened during the political turmoil that followed Yoon’s Dec. 3, 2024, martial law declaration. Young women carrying K-pop light sticks became one of the defining images of the demonstrations demanding Yoon’s impeachment, a movement sometimes described as the “Candlelight Revolution.” Academic research on the protests has identified women in their 20s and 30s as a central force in transforming light sticks into symbols of political solidarity.
When Lee won the 2025 presidential election, exit polling again showed 58 percent of women in their 20s and 57 percent of women in their 30s backing him, making young women a crucial part of the coalition that brought the DP back to the presidency.
Against that history, Lee’s current 17.6 percent job approval among women in their 20s stands out as a particularly severe warning sign for the ruling camp.
“The Lee Jae Myung administration is making appointments and pursuing policies that run counter to fairness, which is the highest priority for people in their 20s,” PPP lawmaker Kim So-hee told AJP. “People in their 20s aren’t driven by progressive or conservative ideology. If you go against their most important value, they turn their backs on you.”
PPP lawmaker Ahn Sang-hoon similarly linked the shift to economic anxiety and perceptions of unequal opportunity.
“Policies on housing and jobs are kicking away the ladders for younger generations, while the DP is cutting deals with the KCTU and people in their 40s and 50s, fueling anger among people in their 20s and 30s,” Ahn said.
“Reforms to save future generations from mounting pension and welfare debt are being led by the PPP, including myself,” he added. “Most recently, Yong Hye-in’s unfair, preferential form of youth politics caused anger among the 2030 generation to explode.”
But the PPP’s rebound has also opened a separate argument inside the conservative camp: how much credit belongs to Han Dong-hoon.
Han, a former justice minister and former PPP leader, was expelled from the party in January and now serves in the National Assembly as an independent. He has nevertheless emerged as one of the most aggressive figures attacking Kim’s nomination, repeatedly releasing recordings and allegations connected to the drug-approval controversy.
His Facebook output has itself become a political story. One media count found that Han published nearly 100 Facebook posts in the nine days following Kim’s nomination, with more than 20 posts on his busiest day.
PPP lawmaker Jeong Yeon-wook argued that Han’s political presence is helping the party regardless of his formal status.
“The rise in PPP support is both a reflexive benefit from the DP’s tyranny and a reflection of the ‘Han Dong-hoon effect,’” Jeong told AJP. “Even though Han was expelled, there is a public perception that he effectively still belongs to the PPP. Jang Dong-hyeok is simply the party leader. He is not the driving force behind the rise in support.”
Other PPP lawmakers sharply disagreed.
“That’s quite a stretch,” PPP lawmaker Lee Cheol-kyu told AJP when asked about the claimed “Han Dong-hoon effect.”
PPP lawmaker Choi Soo-jin offered an equally terse explanation.
“It’s because there is no internal division,” Choi said of the PPP’s rising support. “Han Dong-hoon is an independent.”
The disagreement underscores an awkward reality for the opposition: Han has no PPP membership but remains deeply entangled with the party’s political fortunes, while his campaign against Kim has often been more visible than the attacks coming from the PPP leadership itself.
The longer-term question is whether the current movement among young voters, and particularly young women, represents a lasting conservative shift or a rejection of the ruling party over specific issues of fairness, housing and criminal justice.
Former PPP Supreme Council member Kim Jong-hyuk argued that part of the answer lies in changing memories of the gender politics that once made conservatives deeply unpopular with younger women.
“Young people have become disgusted with the hypocrisy and shamelessness of the party of the 1980s activist generation,” Kim told AJP.
“In the case of women, there was resistance to conservatives because of Lee Jun-seok’s politics of division, but that feeling has faded over time,” he said. “In particular, I think they have become angry at the Democratic administration’s position on prosecutors’ supplementary investigative powers.”
That history remains important.
During the 2022 presidential campaign, then-PPP leader Lee Jun-seok was widely credited with a strategy aimed at expanding conservative support among young men. After reconciling with Lee following an internal feud, Yoon posted the seven-word Korean pledge “Abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family” on Facebook, a move interpreted at the time as a direct appeal to male voters in their 20s.
The strategy helped Yoon dominate among young men, but it also produced a mirror-image backlash among young women.
AJP Takeaways
- President Lee Jae Myung’s approval among voters aged 18 to 29 fell to 18.6 percent, while the ruling DP’s support among voters in their 20s dropped to 15.0 percent.
- The PPP surged to 61.5 percent among voters in their 20s, as opposition lawmakers linked the shift to fairness controversies, housing pressure and debate over prosecutors’ supplementary investigative powers.
- The rebound has also exposed divisions inside the PPP, with lawmakers split over whether former leader Han Dong-hoon deserves credit for the party’s rising support.
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