Arya News - The party’s support ratings have continued to decline since its defeat in the 2025 presidential election.
SEOUL – An ongoing dispute within the main opposition People Power Party over its relationship with former President Yoon Suk Yeol is highlighting the tension between loyalty to former leaders and the need for renewal that often entangles South Korean parties.
Accusations of “betrayal” have become a recurring feature, as parties struggle to reset after aligning themselves with powerful figures.
The conservative party remains locked in an internal struggle: Party leaders seek to maintain ties with the ousted leader, while other lawmakers call for a clean break.
Calls to distance the party from Yoon have intensified amid mounting criminal convictions against the former president, including one last week for leading an insurrection. Many lawmakers warn that continued association with the former president risks undermining efforts to rebuild support ahead of the June 3 local elections.
The party’s support ratings have continued to decline since its defeat in the 2025 presidential election.
But party Chair Jang Dong-hyeok has resisted a formal break with Yoon, wary of alienating the party’s core conservative base.
The dispute escalated Friday after Jang criticized the court ruling that sentenced Yoon to life in prison for insurrection.
The renewed infighting has complicated the party’s broader reorganization efforts.
The People Power Party has struggled to reverse a sharp decline in approval since Yoon’s ouster, while preparing for local elections widely viewed as a test of the conservative bloc’s post-Yoon viability.
Discussions over party rebranding — including a possible name change intended to signal renewal — were floated earlier this year, but have largely stalled as internal debate repeatedly returns to how the party should define its relationship with the former president.
Political commentator Jang Seong-cheol said the stalemate reflects structural characteristics of South Korean voter behavior.
“Compared with voters in many other democracies, South Korean voters tend to display stronger personal loyalty toward political leaders and are highly sensitive to narratives of betrayal,” Jang said. “Even when party leadership attempts to create distance, core supporters often rally more strongly around the former leader.”
He added that Rep. Jang owes his own political career to strong backing from Yoon-supporting hard-liners, and his continued reliance on that political base limits his ability to break from the former president.
Choi Chang-ryul, a political science professor at Yongin University, said the situation reflects deeper institutional characteristics of South Korea’s party system.
“Political parties here are frequently reorganized around individual leaders rather than long-term policy platforms,” Choi said. “Under a powerful single-term presidential system, former presidents continue to function as political symbols even after leaving office, making a clean separation structurally difficult.”
The pattern has appeared before.
Following President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment in 2017, conservative leaders attempted to rebuild their image by distancing themselves from her, but loyal supporters instead consolidated around the former president, prolonging factional conflict and delaying the conservatives’ political recovery.
“If a party remains tied to a former president, it struggles to expand toward moderate voters,” Choi said. “But severing ties too abruptly risks a backlash from core supporters and can trigger internal fragmentation.”
Leadership succession problems further reinforce the cycle, Choi added, noting that strong presidential authority often overshadows potential successors during a presidency.
“When a president leaves office, parties frequently face a leadership vacuum,” he said. “That vacuum allows former leaders’ political influence to persist long after their formal power ends.”
Meanwhile, similar tensions have surfaced within the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, suggesting the phenomenon extends beyond former presidents and reflects a broader pattern of presidentialized party politics.
Democratic Party leader Rep. Jung Chung-rae — long associated with the party’s Moon Jae-in supporters — was recently expelled from President Lee Jae Myung’s main online supporter community after repeated clashes with Lee supporters, who accused him of undermining party unity.
While Lee remains the sitting president, critics say the episode demonstrates how organized supporter bases aligned with presidential figures can exert pressure even on senior party leaders, blurring the boundary between formal party authority and grassroots mobilization.
A former lawmaker who served from 2020 to 2024, speaking on condition of anonymity, said both major parties remain trapped in recurring cycles of factional competition shaped by presidential legacies rather than policy agendas.
“Korean politics still tends to revolve around presidential figures and intrafactional loyalty struggles instead of policy competition,” the former lawmaker said. “Unless parties move beyond that structure, similar conflicts will continue regardless of which side holds power.”