The Future of South Korea’s People Power Party Is up for Grabs

South Korea’s largest conservative party has changed its name so many times that it’s hard to remember all of them.

When former President Park Geun-hye controlled the party, it was called the Saenuri Party.  In February 2017, as Park was awaiting the Constitutional Court’s verdict on her impeachment, the Saenuri Party changed its name to the Liberty Korea Party. Plastering a new label, however, didn’t mean the content changed. The party’s leadership, its legislators, and modus operandi remained pretty much the same.

Concerned about the 2020 general elections, the LKP absorbed other conservative factions, taking on a new name, the United Future Party. The rebranding made little difference; the UFP won just 103 out of 300 National Assembly seats.

The party changed its name again in the aftermath, to the People Power Party (PPP).

It fared well for the next two years. The PPP won some by-elections; it even won the 2022 presidential election. But its success wasn’t because the PPP managed some introspection, much less a drastic structural overhaul, since Park’s time. Neither was there an influx of new ideas and figures. No, the PPP’s success was due to external factors in the two years from the 2020 general elections to the 2022 presidential election: COVID-19, skyrocketing housing prices, and numerous scandals among the Democratic Party (DP). The DP couldn’t overcome the anti-incumbency sentiment that resulted, though it came close – the PPP’s Yoon Suk-yeol won the presidential election in 2022 by less than a percentage point.

A clique of PPP members still controlled the party. They picked electoral candidates based on their malleability and susceptibility to the PPP bigwigs’ influences. In late 2021, a few PPP legislators who used to be prosecutors cajoled Yoon into joining the PPP and running in the 2022 presidential election. They wanted someone who shared the same ideological perspective and who would listen to them.

As it turned out, Yoon fit the bill on the first count, but not the second.

Yoon was never easy to manage, and he effectively supplanted the PPP leadership. He turned the party structure into his own playground, working alongside other PPP legislators who went to the same college or who also used to be prosecutors. Even after Yoon was officially ousted from power, the PPP leadership’s shtick hasn’t changed.

This is crucial in understanding how the PPP has approached and waged its campaigns for the upcoming snap presidential election. Let’s start with Kim Moon-soo, the PPP’s presidential candidate. He was never on the radar to be given the ticket. When Kim was young, his family was so poor that his family of seven had to live in a makeshift one-bedroom structure made out of corrugated steel. Still, in 1970, he went to the country’s best school, Seoul National University, where he was suspended twice for leading pro-democracy movements.

After graduation, he worked in a clothing factory and then as a boiler mechanic. He also led prominent labor movements, eventually being locked up and tortured by the police in 1980. In 1986, he served two years in jail for his pro-democracy activism. His health is still affected by the maltreatment of the time.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, however, Kim was disenchanted by Marxism and lost hope in arousing the workers. In a dramatic show of opportunism, he joined the conservative party and served as a legislator three times in the 1990s and 2000s and then as governor of Gyeonggi province until 2014. After that, Kim was politically inactive until Yoon appointed him as the minister of employment and labor in 2024. As if to thank Yoon for his resurgence, Kim has staunchly endorsed Yoon’s anti-labor stance and justified Yoon’s martial law.

Yoon, however, reportedly wanted his former Prime Minister Han Duck-soo to run for the presidency on the PPP ticket. But it was apparent that Han couldn’t possibly win the PPP primary against other popular contenders. So the party concocted a master plan to back Kim in the primary, anoint him as the PPP candidate, and then replace Kim with Han by merging their camps. The plan corresponded well to the PPP leaders’ ingrained habit of handpicking a candidate they believed would be easy to manipulate.

In order for the plan to work, the PPP needed to make sure Han Dong-hoon, Yoon’s former protege and his first justice minister, lost the primary. Han had been disillusioned by Yoon’s incompetence and irrationality and swore to sever any and all ties with the former president. Han Dong-hoon wanted to thoroughly restructure the PPP without Yoon’s influence; he would never agree to step aside for Yoon’s preferred candidate.

The PPP legislators – especially Kwon Sung-dong, the former PPP chairman and Kwon Young-se, the former PPP whip, both of whom were prosecutors together with Yoon – started ganging up on Han Dong-hoon to discredit him. Still, Han and Kim were neck-and-neck heading into the final round of the PPP primary. The PPP hid the particulars of the primary vote, simply revealing a final result that favored Kim by a few percentage points. Han alleged that “a few PPP members colluded and cheated during the primary to make me lose.”

But if the PPP leadership had backed Kim because they believed he could be easily swayed, they were wrong. Kim changed his mind once he won the primary and suddenly refused to cede his candidacy to Han Duck-soo. The PPP top brass was taken aback, and started immediately to malign their party’s own candidate as displaying “unreliable characteristics” of a labor activist. The two Kwons then unilaterally annulled Kim’s qualification and appointed Han Duck-soo as the PPP presidential candidate.

The PPP voters, even those who had rooted for Yoon’s martial law, were shocked at such an autocratic move. The PPP supporters pressured the party chiefs to circulate a survey and carry out an informal vote, where the PPP members rejected replacing Kim.

Besides the existing three factions within the PPP – pro-Yoon, pro-Han Dong-hoon, and pro-Kim – the whole fracas created another conservative faction congregating around Hong Jun-pyo. He quit as mayor of Daegu, the most conservative city in the country, to run for the PPP primary, only to be disillusioned by the party’s master plan against Kim and the PPP coup. Incredibly, Hong’s fans started voicing their support for the DP’s Lee Jae-myung, the PPP’s bete noire.

Meanwhile, both pro-Yoon politicians and Han Dong-hoon began campaigning for Kim. They all purportedly support the PPP candidate, but their rhetoric and behavior indicate that they are not really touring the country for Kim’s sake, but looking to advance their agenda to control the PPP. On May 23, Han told a group of PPP voters that “I’m not here for the pro-Yoon dregs.”

Meanwhile, pro-Yoon PPP members approached Lee Jun-seok, a former PPP chairman who was ousted from the party by Yoon and created the Reform Party. Lee Jun-seok was reportedly offered control of the PPP in return for merging his candidacy with Kim’s – a gambit Lee rejected, saying, “I am not interested in unification [of candidacies].”

All the PPP factions are keen not so much on trying to win the snap election – where Lee Jae-myung’s victory is seen as essentially inevitable – as on quarreling over party control. The pro-Yoon faction has realized that they can’t easily handle Kim; they are looking for someone else to serve as a stooge. Han Dong-hoon and his supporters need to drive out the pro-Yoons to reshape the PPP. Meanwhile, the pro-Kims naively believe that Kim stands a decent chance at winning the presidential election, after which they will take over the PPP.

As for Hong Jun-pyo’s fans, they believe the PPP should be disbanded and the conservatives should come up with a completely new party – not just the same old party with yet another new name.

A rebranding of the PPP is bound to happen after the snap election. And the internal struggle for who gets to rename the party – and, more importantly, control it and lead it – is raging fiercely.

Who comes out on top in the PPP is also important for the future of South Korean politics. If either the pro-Yoon or pro-Kim factions win the day, South Korean politics will stand still again, as these PPP factions are absolutely incompatible with Lee Jae-myung. They haven’t renounced Yoon and his self-coup, making meaningful compromise impossible. Lee would never listen to them. If, however, the supporters of either Han Dong-hoon or Hong Jun-pyo win control of the party, there could emerge a decent stepping stone from which to reckon with the PPP’s past and Yoon’s legacy – and find common ground between the DP and the conservatives.