How a former factory worker rose to South Korea’s presidency 

Seongnam, South Korea – South Korean President-Sey Jae-Myung, who has always described his politics personally described his politics from the “misery” of his youth.

Three years ago, in the last President of the conservative opponent’s work Yoon Suk YeolA former prosecutor objected to the superiority of the law and told a story from his childhood: how his family’s poverty pushed him to the factory assembly lines and how his mother walked to work every morning.

Bakan Behind every policy I implemented, my own poor and life life was the daily struggles of ordinary South Koreans, ”he said.

Although Lee lost this race by 0.73 percent, it was Yoon, who prepared the ground for Lee’s return with 247,077 votes. Hit half of the advertisement martial law In December, the former president is now trial for the uprising.

In the presidential elections that took place on Tuesday, the liberal Lee winner appeared and South Korea’s three major television broadcasters called the race just before midnight.

In the campaign trail, Lee framed her run as a task. Restore the country’s democratic norms. But at the same time, he returned to the theme that has turned into a political brand from the longing for the signature of childhood: the promise of a society that offers a vulnerable “thick security matta ında is a way out of puddles.

Lee, one -fifth of the seven brothers born in December 1963, grew up in Seongnam, a city close to the southeastern edge of Seoul, and when his family settled in 1976, he was known as a neighborhood for those evacuated from the capital of the capital.

The family rented a single semi -basement room by a local market where her father made a living cleaner. Sometimes his family lived with fruits thrown. Lee’s mother worked as a bathroom officer around the corner.

Lee spent young years jumping from one factory to another to help. At the age of 13, his first job was to lead a jewelery manufacturer for 12 hours a day, and Acriv was breathing in smoke. Another business jumped to the owner Lee without paying a three -month fee.

A few years later, Lee had an accident that permanently broke his left arm, while running a press machine in a baseball glove factory. In despair, Lee tried to end his own life. The pharmacist, whom he went to only for sleeping pills, survived because he caught the wind of his intentions.

The banners containing decisions and opposition presidential candidates hang on a street in Seoul days before an election in March 2022.

(Ahn Young-Joon / Associated Press)

Lee then started to work for secondary and high school at night after I got out of work. He proved to be a talented student and won a full journey to Chung-Ann University to study law.

After the South Korea’s bar exam in 1986, he moved by a course given by Roh Moo-Hyun, a human rights lawyer who continued to become president in 2003, and 26-year-old Lee opened his own legal practice to do the same thing.

Seongnam developed rapidly at the time, there was a place for several projects, and Lee threw himself into local guard activism.

73-year-old Ha Dong-Geun, 73-year-old Ha Dong-Geun, who spent Lee in the city, remembered the day they met: Secondly, he wore a great expression of urgency.

“He wasn’t afraid what others thought about him.”

Ha, he remembered Lee as a sharp strategic mind about to find the weaknesses of his opponent. Nevertheless, despite their noise, it was more difficult to achieve significant change, and in 2004 led Lee’s political awakening.

A year ago, two of the city’s major hospitals closed and threatened accessibility in the poorest neighborhoods of emergency care. However, Lee’s campaign collected approximately 20,000 signatures from the residents to build a state hospital in their places, but the proposal was immediately shot by the Municipal Assembly.

Lee, in 2021 at the time, “ruling people do not care about the health and lives of people,” he wrote. “If they don’t, let’s do it ourselves. Instead of asking for someone else, I will be the mayor and I will do it with my own hands.”

Lee Jae-Myung was attacked and injured during his visit to Busan in South Korea in January 2024.

(Sohn Hyung-Joo / Yonhap / AP)

Lee was the Mayor of Seongnam from 2010 to 2018. During this time, he paid over $ 400 million left behind by his predecessor. He moved his office from the ninth to the second floor, and often looked at questions or complaints from citizens himself.

However, the best, despite the intense opposition of the conservative central government at the time, was known for its welfare policies: free school lunch, free school uniforms for secondary schools and financial support for new mothers looking for postnatal care. For all 24 -year -old citizens, the city provided a basic income of $ 720 annually in the form of cash coupons that can be used in local businesses.

In 2016, the situation of a high school student who could not meet sanitary pads by using a shoe, when he made national headlines, the city also added a program that gives cash for insufficient young girls for female hygiene products. A few years later, Lee promised a campaign to establish a state hospital that pushed him to politics for the first time.

“My personal experiences were aware of how cruel this world could be for those who have nothing,” he said.

Although Lee left the city to be the governor of the Gyeonggi province and to put the third presidential run to the stage, the registered is still inspired to severe loyalty in the working class neighborhoods of Seongnam, where Lee is remembered as a constructor who looks even small things.

Kim Kim Seung-Man, who owns a shop in Sangdaewon Market, where Lee’s family echoed with many people, echoing openness and communication, echoing with many people. “The working -class people are identified with him because he had a very difficult childhood.”

People shout slogans during a rally on April 4, 2025 and to celebrate the dismissal of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was blocked by the Constitutional Court.

(Lee Jin-Man / Associated Press)

And when the Seongnam Citizen Medical Center, which was opened in 2020, becomes a target for critics who rejected Lee’s welfare policies as cheap populism, he says that there is a life line for this working class neighborhood.

“It was a treatment center for Covid patients during the pandemi,” he said. “Service to the public interest means to do so regardless of whether it is profitable.”

Beyond Seongnam’s working-class neighborhoods, Lee is a fact that cannot be explained by its policies that has caused equally intense discontent.

Some have attributed it to rude, sometimes confrontational attitude, and others to classist prejudice. Lee pointed out the status of “foreign” in the world of South Korean establishment policy, where most ambitious young politicians follow a scenario where their ways have escaped: a party that will open the door to the appropriate legislative seats.

Im I didn’t borrow anybody during my time in politics, Lee Lee said at a press conference last month.

He faced attacks from his own party, and the conservatives used him as a tyrant and guilty by making allegations against him in legal cases. Former president Yoon stated that the liberal opposition, led by Lee as a reason for proclaiming martial law in December.

Cho Jin-Man, a political scientist at Dukung Women’s University, said, “There are still discussions on character or ethics,” he said. “No boring clean appearance.”

Since the loss of 2022 elections, Lee has faced many accusations, including election law violations and the development of a real estate development project as the Mayor of Seongnam – the indictments that Lee decided politically by Yoon and its allies.

Lee Jae-Myung speaks at a press conference on December 15, about the appeal of President Yoon Suk Yeol.

(Lee Jin-Man / Associated Press)

Few allegations against Lee stuck. Others, like a substance of election law that prohibited the lying during their campaigns, were constantly implemented, a technique that has been often exploited to survive a small number of politicians.

“On the contrary, they have caused the perception that there were problems in prosecution service, Cho said Cho.

In recent months, Lee has tried to soften the rough edges of public personnel to correct the country’s increasingly flammable partisan slits.

Last year, after getting rid of a great vein attempt on the neck of the attacker’s knife, Lee condemned the “hate policy ve, which had rooted in the country, and called for a new mutual respect and calling to live together.

In his last campaign, Lee invoiced better labor protections and the welfare agenda with more public housing and public health services, not as a class war, but as prudent pragmatism, and reflected his efforts to win over moderate conservatives.

However, there are still questions whether Lee, who controls both the executive and legislature branches, will now be successful.

“Now there is a clear way to force what he wants very efficiently, Cho Cho said. “But the nature of power is that those who hold it will not necessarily use restrictions.”

Although Lee promised not to ask for an ordeal against his political enemies as president, he made it clear that those who cooperate with former president Yoon’s illegal power will be held responsible – inevitably a movement that will flame the partisan dispute.

The working -class history did not prevent the criticism of workers’ activists who said that the proposal to increase the internal semiconductor industry would withdraw their rights.

This background will do very little for Lee’s first and most urgent agenda item: Tariffs on South Korean cars, steel and aluminum will be fully enacted in July.

“I don’t think Lee and Trump will have a good chemistry, Cho Cho said.

“Both have very strong personalities, but it is very different in terms of political ideology and personal training.”