Knife Attack on South Korea’s Opposition Leader Further Polarizes Politics

Sympathy and concern usually await politicians who survive assassination attempts. Take the example of Park Geun-hye, who became South Korea’s first female president. In 2006, in the days leading up to a general election, a man pretending to be Park’s supporter slashed her face with a box cutter. The blade missed her neck by an inch. She was the opposition leader at the time, and her conservative party – now the People Power Party (PPP) – performed way better than expected in the 2006 general election. Analysts concurred that pity votes poured forth in her favor.

The current opposition leader, Lee Jae-myung of the liberal Democratic Party (DP), was also the target of an assassination attempt in South Korea – he was stabbed in the neck in Busan, a conservative stronghold, on January 2. The knife pierced his jugular vein, and vessels connected to the carotid artery were also damaged. The former carries blood from the head to the heart, and the latter carries it back up to the head. In other words, Lee could have died had the knife lodged just millimeters deeper.

However, surprisingly, the incident has had an adverse effect on Lee’s stature and that of the DP.

The DP was already floundering before the incident. Since the latter half of 2022, the DP under Lee had been obsessed with checking President Yoon Suk-yeol’s “republic of prosecutors,” a slogan referring to Yoon’s packing of his Cabinet and the government with either prosecutors who used to work for him or alumni from his law school. The DP’s obsession is understandable and necessary to a certain extent  – the Yoon administration, run as it is by former career prosecutors without much knowledge of government, has doddered on many critical fronts such as South Korea’s low fertility rate, rising living costs, climate change, pension reforms, and disaster management.

In its pounding on Yoon, however, the DP gave off the impression that it had lost its party identity and neglected to present appealing alternatives.

Meanwhile, the DP has shielded Lee at all costs. Lee has been under investigation on corruption charges for his alleged involvement in a shady property development scheme while he was mayor of a mid-size town outside of Seoul. The DP seemed to be doing only two things: finding faults with Yoon and indulging Lee.

Some DP legislators demanded Lee step down as party chief so that the party could present a refreshed look ahead of the April general elections. The party leadership ignored those voices. In December, Lee Nak-yon, a former prime minister and a four-term parliamentarian, submitted an ultimatum to Lee Jae-myung that he would leave the party unless the latter resigned. Their negotiations failed as Lee Jae-myung defended the necessity of his leadership.

At first, when Lee Jae-myung was stabbed and hospitalized, there was a hushed sense of relief among the party leadership. At last, they thought, rebels and straddlers would fall back in line in the face of a ruthless assassination attempt. During Lee’s convalescence, the party refused to comment on the internal strife, thinking the party divide would close just as Lee’s gash did.

Lee thought the same. On January 10, in his first appearance in public since the attack, he insisted on crucifying the Yoon administration, while uttering not a single word on accommodating dissenters and consolidating the party, with or without him.

It’s impossible to know if Lee Jae-myung and Lee Nak-yon might have mended fences had it not been for the attack on the DP leader and his subsequent hospitalization. Regardless, it was already too late by the time he recovered. The DP and Lee Jae-myung’s silence on the discontent with his leadership upset both voters and anti-Lee factions within the DP.

With less than three months left until the general elections, Lee Jae-myung’s critics believed the party wasted precious time and kept them in the dark. Making good on his threat, Lee Nak-yon defected from the DP on January 11. Other legislators and young DP members followed his suit. A Gallup poll the next day found that only 23 percent of South Koreans considered Lee Jae-myung – the DP’s unsuccessful candidate for the 2022 election – a legitimate candidate for the next presidential race, while only 34 percent said they would support the DP in the upcoming general election.

More than half of respondents said they did not support the ruling People Power Party, either. But the fact that the DP’s approval rating had dropped this low caused alarm. In another survey, 9 percent of progressive voters indicated their willingness to vote for Lee Nak-yon’s new party. That could scupper the DP’s sworn oath to dethrone Yoon.

Meanwhile, Lee Jun-seok, a former PPP chairman, created his own party, which is expected to siphon a similar number of conservatives from the PPP. The breakaway Lees are now hashing out ways to merge their parties to create a “third zone.”

At the same time, the PPP is trying to turn the attack on Lee Jae-myung to their benefit. It argued that the DP further polarized the public by churning out yet another round of conspiracy theories. The DP alleged that the government abused its power to manipulate public opinion after the knife attack. The Prime Minister’s Office sent out emergency texts to people’s phones stating that Lee’s wound was not grave, which led to a rumor that Lee faked the whole thing. The police also initially concealed the attacker’s identity and his years-long affiliation with the PPP.

While Lee was in his hospital bed, Han Dong-hoon, Yoon’s first justice minister and now the face of the PPP, toured areas teeming with Lee’s supporters. He called Lee “delusional” for thinking the government manipulated the fallout of the incident.

Lee even became the subject of an investigation by the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission regarding his use of a helicopter to be transferred to a hospital in Seoul. The Commission viewed the medevac as potentially constituting improper solicitation and abuse of privileges by a politician.

It remains to be seen whether the DP will jettison Lee along with his baggage of “judicial risks” and “authoritarian party rule.” In the meantime, it is deplorable that South Korea’s politics has become so polarized as to use any incident as an excuse to fuel mutual hatred.