Former Prime Minister Kim Min-seok was elected as the leader of the ruling Democratic Party (DP), closing out a six-week race that exposed deep rifts between rival camps aligned with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung and outgoing party chair Jung Chung-rae.
Kim, a four-term lawmaker, won 54.08 percent of the final vote announced at the party’s national convention in Daejeon, defeating Jung, who took 45.92 percent. Kim fell short of a first-round majority under the combined count of member, delegate, and opinion-poll votes, triggering the party’s ranked-choice runoff for the first time in its history. Under that process, second-choice votes from backers of third-place finisher Rep. Song Young-gil were redistributed between Kim and Jung, producing Kim’s final voting margin.
The new DP leader will oversee candidate nominations for the general elections in April 2028. More than that, the race was widely seen as a test of how firmly Lee has consolidated control over the DP since assuming presidency in 2025. The contest has widely been described as a proxy fight between the pro-Lee camp and a harder-line faction associated with Jung, who has at times pushed back against the presidential office on the pace of judicial overhaul and other issues. Kim’s campaign speech in July framed the race as a referendum on whether the party would fully back Lee’s agenda,
Kim’s strongest results came in Gwangju and the Jeolla provinces and the greater Seoul area after Lee announced an 800 trillion won ($564 billion) semiconductor investment package for the Gwangju region. Overall, however, Lee’s approval rating slipped to 44 percent in recent days, the lowest since he took office, according to local media reports.
How the Election Unfolded
This was the DP’s first party chair race under the new one-member, one-vote system. Dues-paying members and delegates account for 70 percent of the weight, and a national opinion survey makes up the remaining 30 percent.
The public opinion poll was conducted over two days by two polling firms among a combined 4,000 respondents reached by automated phone survey, with participation limited to Democratic Party supporters and independents to screen out backers of the conservative opposition.
Because no rule guarantees a majority winner, the party adopted ranked-choice voting: if no candidate clears 50 percent on first-preference ballots, the last-place finisher is eliminated and votes are reallocated by second choice.
The voting took place in waves, with results announced region by region. Voting opened August 1 in Chungcheong, where Kim narrowly outpolled Jung, 45.05 percent to 44.61 percent, with Song a distant third at 10.34 percent. Jung answered the next day in Busan, Ulsan, and South Gyeongsang Province, beating Kim 46.65 percent to 43.85 percent. Kim then won Jeju and Incheon on August 8 with 47.75 percent to Jung’s 42.08 percent, and a fourth round spanning Gangwon Province, Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province followed on August 9, with Kim ahead 48.54 percent to 44.40 percent and the cumulative gap narrowing to 1.48 points.
The race turned decisively in Kim’s favor on August 15 in Gwangju and the Jeolla provinces, the party’s largest single bloc of members at roughly a third of the total. Kim won 57.54 percent there to Jung’s 32.65 percent, pushing his cumulative share past 50 percent for the first time. The final regional round, in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province on August 16, went to Kim by a far tighter margin, 46.66 percent to 46.28 percent, pulling his majority back below 50 percent and leaving him with an overall cumulative lead of 49.91 percent to 41.51 percent heading into August 17 and the party’s national convention.
Supreme Council Race
Alongside the chair, on August 17 the DP seated five Supreme Council members from an eight-candidate field. Voters picked two of the eight names and the five candidates with the highest combined vote share won seats, with the top finisher becoming senior Supreme Council member. Five of the eight candidates were aligned with the pro-Lee camp – Rep. Park Sun-won, Rep. Kim Yong, Rep. Seo Mi-hwa, Rep. Kim Young-ho, and Rep. Im Mi-ae – while three were aligned with Jung’s camp – Rep. Choi Min-hee, Rep. Han Min-soo, and Rep. Lee Sung-yoon.
Late on August 16, two lower-ranked pro-Lee candidates, Im Mi-ae and Kim Young-ho, dropped out of the race and threw their support behind Kim Yong, in an effort to consolidate pro-Lee votes and prevent Jung’s camp from taking three of the five seats.
The final results confirmed a split verdict. Choi finished first by vote share and will serve as senior Supreme Council member, followed in order by Park Sun-won, Seo Mi-hwa, Lee Sung-yoon and Han Min-soo. Three of the five seats went to lawmakers aligned with Jung while only two went to pro-Lee lawmakers. Kim Yong, the candidate whom Im and Kim Young-ho withdrew to support, fell short of a seat despite their last-minute endorsement.
The outcome leaves incoming DP chair Kim Min-seok with a Supreme Council in which lawmakers aligned with his defeated rival hold a majority of the elected seats. The divide is likely to complicate Kim’s efforts to consolidate the party behind President Lee heading into the 2028 general elections.
Who Is Kim Min-seok?
Kim, the new leader of the DP, belongs to South Korea’s so-called 86 generation, student activists who led the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s and later entered mainstream politics. As Seoul National University’s student council president, he was recruited into politics in 1990 by the late President Kim Dae-jung and joined the merger of Kim’s party with the New Democratic Alliance Party, earning him the nickname “first son of democratic unification.” Elected to the National Assembly in 1996 at age 32, he was the youngest lawmaker of his time and won a second term in 2000.
His rise stalled in October 2002, when he left the party during a dispute over unifying the presidential candidacies of Roh Moo-hyun and Chung Mong-joon, a decision that resurfaced repeatedly as a line of attack from Jung during the campaign. Kim lost his Assembly seat in 2004 and spent several years outside elected politics, including periods of study in the United States and China. He returned to the party’s leadership as a Supreme Council member in 2008 but was later barred from running for office for five years over a political funding case. He founded a small breakaway party in 2014 before it merged back into the DP in 2016 under then-chair Choo Mi-ae.
Kim won back a National Assembly seat in 2020 and secured a fourth term in 2024. His alignment with Lee Jae-myung deepened during the 2022 presidential race, when he headed strategy for Lee’s campaign. Kim went on to serve as the DP’s policy chief and, from 2024, as senior Supreme Council member under Lee’s own chairmanship. After Lee’s election as president following the impeachment of Yoon Suk-yeol, Kim was named the first prime minister of the Lee administration in mid-2025, a post in which he oversaw the APEC summit in Gyeongju and met with U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in Washington before stepping down at the end of June 2026 to run for party chair. He is now regarded within the DP as a potential future presidential contender.
