President Lee Jae-myung’s Falling Approval Ratings

South Korea cycled through acting presidents from December 2024, when the National Assembly impeached former President Yoon Suk-yeol, to June 4, 2025, when Lee Jae-myung, former head of the Democratic Party (DP), assumed office after a snap presidential election. With a new president finally installed, the country buzzed with a sense of expectancy and normalcy.

Throughout June and July, Lee’s approval ratings floated over the 60-percentage mark. His public appearances reassured the nation. He frequented government agencies. This alarmed ministers and higher-ups, who had been appointed by Yoon and largely left untouched except for when Yoon goaded them to advance personal favors. Lee upbraided them for slacking, demanding new plans and reforms. Cabinet meetings regained their vibrancy, too. Lee held them for hours on end, whereas Yoon used to convene the sessions only as a formality, dismissing them minutes later.

Meanwhile, special counsels started to investigate and round up those implicated in the Yoon administration’s innumerable scandals. There had been much pent-up, repressed resentment and indignation among the populace at how law enforcement looked the other way and spared Yoon’s cronies. The special counsels’ restoration of justice initially boosted Lee’s popularity.

However, approval ratings for the Lee administration nosedived in August. In its poll published on August 18, Realmeter, one of South Korea’s authoritative pollsters, pegged Lee’s approval rating at 51 percent – meaning Lee had shed more than 10 percentage points in just less than three weeks.

His standing was essentially unchanged, up just 0.3 percentage points, in the next poll published on August 25. However, Lee’s disapproval rating reached a new high of 44.9 percent in the August 25 poll results.

There are a few factors behind this fall. First, Lee’s decision to pardon some prominent political figures earned public ire. Among them was Cho Kuk, a former justice minister jailed for falsifying his daughter’s academic records to facilitate her college entrance. According to Gallup and Realmeter, Cho Kuk’s pardon and his subsequent media appearances accounted for the bulk of the drop in Lee’s approval ratings. Ahn Cheol-soo, a legislator with the opposition People Power Party (PPP), said on his social media, “Thank you, Cho Kuk. Welcome, Cho Kuk,” encouraging him to “keep being the attention-seeker that everyone frowns upon.” 

When Cho was justice minister in 2019, he wanted to reform the prosecutor’s office, which abused its powers of investigation and indictment to eliminate political foes. Yoon, the chief prosecutor at the time, and his underlings funneled all their energy into crippling Cho and thereby impeding the momentum for prosecutorial reform. Essentially, the prosecutors dug until they found dirt on Cho and his daughter.

The ensuing scandal disheartened many young voters who were struggling with college and job applications themselves. The public backlash forced Cho to retire and dampened the fervor for the Moon administration’s various reforms.

Lee also pardoned Yoon Mee-hyang, another liberal politician and social activist. Prosecutors had also hounded her, eventually pouncing on evidence that she misappropriated donations meant for “comfort women.” She had failed to account for some $12,000 in donations, for which the Supreme Court handed down a suspended sentence, depriving her of eligibility to run for a National Assembly seat in the future.

While young voters and conservatives bristled at these pardons, the Lee administration justified its decisions based on the need to reverse Yoon’s and his prosecutor friends’ insidious legacy of wielding their authority not for justice but for political vendettas.

Besides the pardons, the Lee administration’s intention to ram through some policies alienated many segments of the population. The government has put forward a tax reform to lower the threshold for taxes on capital gains made through stock investment. The stock market experienced a brief selling frenzy, with KOSPI dipping in response. Middle-aged voters expressed their discontent with the Lee administration in the August polls.

The government also wants to introduce agricultural reform, whereby farmers would be compensated for price shortfalls out of state coffers and the government would buy leftover stock. This policy has long been criticized for contravening free market values and bucking the law of supply and demand. Most South Korean taxpayers also balk at having to provide incentives out of their own pockets for farmers to keep cultivating oversupplied crops.

The Lee administration’s other policies in the pipeline, on the other hand, are not only much needed but also have been promised to his supporters for a long time. There’s the Yellow Envelope Law, which purports to enable subcontractors to negotiate with principal contractors and to restrict conglomerates’ ability to sue their employees for striking. As president, Yoon had vetoed the bill on numerous occasions.

Large companies and white-collar workers fear that the bill would severely constrict their conventional business practices, while the public at large fears that it would generate unnecessary strikes and hamper daily services. Yet Lee has long touted passing the bill as one of his cornerstone labor reforms, given conglomerates’ reliance on the absence of safety nets for subcontractors to evade their workplace liability.

Likewise, reforming the Broadcasting Act has also been badly needed. For now, the boards of directors for South Korea’s three public broadcasters are appointed by the Korea Communications Commission, the head of which is appointed by the president. Public broadcasters have either been government mouthpieces or at least prone to self-censorship due to the KCC’s tendency to apply sanctions for honest, unsavory reporting on the government.

Lee’s Democratic Party (DP), with its majority in the National Assembly, is pushing forward a reform to the Broadcasting Act to increase the number of directors and force them to select heads of public broadcasters from the list of candidates filed by civil advisory boards. This reform is sensible and sound, yet the People Power Party and the right-leaning Reform Party have unfurled propaganda campaigns – successful to a large extent – to smear the change as Lee’s attempt to subjugate public broadcasters to leftist opinions.

Besides all the aforementioned factors, graphic accounts of Yoon’s detention and arrest have also enraged the former president’s far-right supporters and draped a miasma of cruelty over the Lee administration. Yoon resisted due investigative procedures, so the special counsels had to forcibly apprehend him from his detention cell. On their first attempt, he reportedly lay plastered to the floor, wearing just his underwear. Everyone was nonplussed, and opted to simply leave him. The second time, he wouldn’t budge from his chair, so the officials dragged the chair toward the door with Yoon still seated in it; during the process Yoon fell off the chair. He also went to the hospital in handcuffs and an ankle monitor.

It was Yoon’s headlong refusal to cooperate with the authorities that led to the unpalatable drama. Still, a huge chunk of the population seems to have bought into the PPP narrative that the victors – the Lee administration, the DP, and special counsels – were roughing up the vanquished unnecessarily.

No matter how warranted the Lee administration’s actions and policies have been, Lee’s plunging approval ratings could slow down, if not throttle entirely, the pace of the government’s reforms. Following the August 18 round of polls, the spokesperson for the presidential office announced that “the Lee administration always lends an ear to the people’s voice.”

Still, the government and the ruling DP are unlikely to substantively compromise on their agenda. The Lee administration’s new policies and reforms were bound to ruffle some feathers one way or another. His approval ratings would have still been adversely affected even if Lee had watered down or reversed some of his promised policies, since alternative courses of action would disappoint other sectors of the population.

In addition, Jung Chung-rae, the DP’s new leader, swore not to cater to the opposition PPP. Jung refuses to deal with the PPP nor shake hands with them, regarding the latter as “insurrection forces” rather than “an opposition party.”

“You’re supposed to shake hands with human beings,” he added, implying that the PPP isn’t worthy of consideration in policy deliberation.