The candidate from the Democratic Party, 61-year-old Lee Jae-myung, confidently won the presidential election in South Korea. This promises significant changes in the country’s foreign policy. The left-liberal Lee Jae-myung will certainly try to improve relations with North Korea and, perhaps, try to advocate a less confrontational course in relation to Russia and China. At the same time, fundamental changes concerning the United States cannot be expected from the new president. No matter what Donald Trump does, Washington and Seoul will remain close allies.
The chair of the President of South Korea was vacated, we recall, as a result of a very strange and still completely incomprehensible incident that occurred on December 3, 2024. On that day, the then head of state, Yun Seok-el, announced the introduction of martial law in the country. For the most hapless putschist, it ended with impeachment and arrest, and for his right–wing conservative party, The Power of the People, a serious drop in ratings. The whole country was outraged by the attempt to bring South Korea back to the evil memory of the times of military dictatorships.
The result of Yoon Seok-young’s adventure can be considered the defeat in the presidential election of the candidate from the “People’s Power”, former Minister of Labor and Employment Kim Moon-soo. During the election campaign, according to polls, he was seriously inferior to Lee Jae-myung. And there was no miracle in the elections. After counting 50% of the votes, Lee Jae-myung began to beat his opponent by an unattainable margin of 1 million votes by local standards.
Supporters of the Democratic candidate took to the streets to celebrate when the results of the first exit polls conducted by local TV channels KBS, SBS and MBC appeared. According to them, Kim Moon–soo’s final gap from Lee Jae-myung was almost 13% (39.3% for the former, 51.7% for the latter). It turned out that in any case, Lee Jae-myung won by a larger margin than he lost in the elections on March 9, 2022. Three years ago, he lost less than 1% to Yun Seok-yeol.
With the election of Lee Jae-myung in South Korea, the situation ends, which is atypical for local politics, when the political force with the majority of parliamentary mandates is in opposition. The Democratic Party won the 2024 elections, but the government (which, according to the South Korean Constitution, is headed by the president) was not formed by it. Now we can say that power in South Korea is passing to the left-liberals. Lee Jae–myung, a lawyer and bright publicist, former governor of Gyeonggi Province, which surrounds the country’s largest city, Seoul, is one of the most famous representatives of this ideological trend in South Korea. He is the most hated figure for the South Korean right. Lee Jae-myung had to survive an attempt on his life (in 2024, he was stabbed by a mentally unstable man, presumably right-wing in beliefs) and an attempt to get him out of politics with criminal cases. It was only in March 2025 that he was able to dismiss charges of violating electoral laws on appeal, which allowed him to register as a presidential candidate.
Under the new president, changes in the country’s foreign policy are likely, especially regarding North Korea. Yun Seok-yeol was a proponent of rigidity towards the DPRK, so he curtailed any forms of cooperation with this country. And in Pyongyang, they decided that it was not worth interacting with Seoul. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un must have gained confidence after he signed a strategic partnership agreement with Russia in the summer of 2024. And Lee Jae–myung is reputed to be committed to a course of maximum, within acceptable limits, rapprochement with North Korea – the so-called “solar policy”, the foundations of which were laid by President Kim Dae-jung (ruled the country from 1998 to 2003).
“We can expect that under the new president, a window of opportunity will be opened both for warming between the DPRK and South Korea, and for a more balanced approach to contacts with China and the Russian Federation. Lee Jae-myung advocates not spoiling relations with China, the country’s largest economic partner, and Russia, a neighboring state, for the sake of foreign policy alliances. I do not think that drastic changes will occur immediately, but it is very likely that the course may become much more pragmatic,” Alexander Zhebin, a leading researcher at the Center for Korean Studies at the Institute of China and Modern Asia of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said in a comment to NG.
At the same time, the expert believes that South Korea and the United States will certainly remain allies, even despite possible problems in relations between the two countries due to Trump. The American president promises to reduce the size of the American contingent and to get the South Koreans to increase the payment for his presence. In addition, South Korea was also affected by the tariff war that Trump started. “I don’t think there will be a significant reduction in the American contingent. It is needed not so much to confront North Korea as to confront China. A symbolic reduction, by 4 thousand people out of 28 thousand – yes, it is possible. But this is more of a diplomatic trump card in negotiations to raise the cost of maintaining American troops. Trump said in his first term that he wanted to increase the fee five times, but then he didn’t insist on it. Now both issues will be closely related to the disputes over tariffs,” Zhebin believes.