The former head of South Korea's ruling party has set up a separate portal
Hu Ruoyu. Lee Jun-seok, former leader of the South Korean People's Power Party, announced on the 27th that he would quit the ruling party and would create a new political party to participate in the parliamentary elections in April next year.
Lee Joon-seok held a press conference in Seoul's Iton district that afternoon to announce the news. He also said that he would "give up all my political assets in the National Power Party."
Nowwon-gu is Lee Jun-seok's "political hometown". He ran for Congress three times here, losing all of them.
Lee Jun-seok said that the current emergency is not for the People's Power Party, but for South Korea, and the political situation needs to be changed. He listed a series of problems caused by the current ineffective policies, and criticized Yoon Suk-yeol and Han Dong-hoon, chairman of the Emergency Countermeasures Committee of the People's Power Party, without naming names.
Lee Jun-seok is a rising political star, having been elected leader of the People's Power Party in June 2021 at the age of 36. South Korea's conservative party was trying to attract more young voters. It's just that Lee Jun-seok and Yoon Suk-yeol, who joined the People's Power Party in July of the same year, have constant contradictions. Yoon Suk-yeol was elected in March 2022.
According to Yonhap News Agency, Lee has a long-standing feud with the mainstream faction within the KMT that is loyal to Yoon Suk-yeol. At the end of 2021, Lee Jun-seok was revealed to have accepted sexual bribes from a company in 2013. In July of the following year, the National Power *** Ethics Committee suspended Lee Jun-seok's party membership rights for six months on suspicion of instigating evidence of destructive bribery, effectively disqualifying him from being the party leader.
Lee Jun-seok said at a news conference that he had submitted an application for registration of the new party to the Election Management Commission of South Korea. Yonhap News Agency reported that the party that Lee Jun-seok plans to create will be formed in mid-to-early January next year. According to him, the new party will not merge with the National Power Party for the sake of the parliamentary elections.
South Korea's "** published an editorial on the 27th, arguing that Lee Jun-seok's establishment of a separate door may help expand the support base of conservatives, and the National Power Party needs to cooperate with this new party.
South Korea is scheduled to hold parliamentary elections in April next year. At this stage, the National Assembly presents a pattern of "going to the Ono and the Big". According to the results of a poll released by Gallup Korea on the 8th of this month, 51% of the public advocated that "in order to contain the current party, more opposition party candidates should be elected to the parliament", and 35% agreed that "in order to support the current party, more ruling party candidates should be elected".
According to Yonhap News Agency's analysis, there are still more than three months before the election, and it is difficult to predict who will win or lose. Yoon Suk-yeol's popular approval rating, the operation of the Emergency Countermeasures Committee of the People's Power Party, and the judicial risks and intra-party unity issues faced by Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the largest opposition Democratic Party, may affect the election results. Lee Nak-yeon, former head of the Democratic Party of Korea and former prime minister, has also begun preparations to create a new political party, which may also change the election campaign. (End) (Special article by Xinhua News Agency).
Keywords: Lee Jun-Seok