Lee Jae-myung and the DPK’s attack on democracy in South Korea

OPINION:

Earlier this month, a senior delegation of South Korean monks openly condemned President Lee Jae-myung and the Democratic Party of Korea as “dictators like Hitler or Stalin.” They declared that “the free Republic of Korea [faces] destruction” as a consequence of Mr. Lee’s regime.

Although accusations of fascism and dictatorial politics have long plagued Mr. Lee and the DPK, the president has refused to address any allegations of wrongdoing. Instead, he has attempted to explain away the DPK’s political transgressions as a necessary result of former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s “self-coup.”

Yet it is clear that Mr. Lee is nothing if not Asia’s most recent left-wing dictator and that the DPK is unequivocally the most urgent and unrepentant enemy to all democracy in South Korea.

First, the Democratic Party of Korea has undermined and violated the fundamental human rights of the South Korean people.

For example, the DPK has precluded South Koreans from exercising their rights to free speech and political assembly. Since the outset of Mr. Lee’s regime, the DPK government has “been constricting free speech on social media platforms” and has launched false investigations into innocent citizens “for nothing more than lawful assembly and free expression,” author Gordon G. Chang wrote in an August op-ed for The Hill.

To suppress right-wing commentary in South Korea and protect its candidates from political criticism, the DPK has introduced various pieces of legislation that explicitly threaten free speech. Morse Tan, a renowned former Trump ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, recently condemned the party’s enthusiastic abuse of the Korean people and their fundamental human rights, saying Mr. Lee’s “attack on freedom is ferocious.”

The DPK has brutally persecuted and terrorized its right-wing political opponents. For instance, it has abused the authority and powers vested in its newly minted “special counsel” to raid the headquarters of its political rival, the People Power Party, with impunity. The DPK has openly broached legislation that seeks to dissolve the PPP entirely.

Early this year, the party falsely arrested Mr. Yoon and charged him with fostering an “insurrection.” It imprisoned the aging Mr. Yoon in a tiny, sweltering cell, deprived him of medicine and subjected the former president to depraved and “inhumane conditions.”

Incredibly, Kim Byung-kee, the Democratic Party of Korea’s floor leader in South Korea’s National Assembly, has even hinted that the DPK intends to imprison Mr. Yoon indefinitely. He said, “Even if [Mr. Yoon] lives, he must live in prison, and even if he dies, he must die in prison.”

The DPK is fraught with corruption. Even its most senior officials have repeatedly violated South Korea’s laws and flagrantly abused the nation’s democratic processes. The Supreme Court of Korea recently convicted Mr. Lee of violating public election law during his 2022 presidential campaign. Mr. Lee is attempting to impose various controversial reforms on the court in a brazen effort to forcibly overturn his conviction and transform South Korea’s justice system into a partisan instrument of the DPK.

Throughout Mr. Yoon’s tenure, the DPK filed dozens of baseless impeachment motions against numerous senior officials — including the interior minister, the chairman of the communications commission and the minister of defense — in a disgraceful effort to force through its abortive political agenda.

Mr. Lee and the DPK openly manufactured “a false narrative of insurrection” and manipulated South Korea’s political apparatus to impeach and arrest Mr. Yoon. In fact, after it wrongfully impeached Mr. Yoon, the DPK promptly exploited its ill-gotten “impeachment power” to “destabilize the interim government of acting President Han Duck-soo” and ultimately move South Korea toward its tainted 2025 presidential election and current DPK government, Mr. Chang’s op-ed said.

Although left-wing pundits and politicians have long attempted to make bigotry, authoritarian politics and fascism the exclusive property of conservatives, it is readily apparent that the human rights violations and undemocratic politics are by no means found solely on the right.

Mr. Lee is a living testament to the fact that left-wing politicians and political actors routinely seek to violate the fundamental human rights of their people and contravene democracy’s most fundamental processes to accomplish their own “progressive” ideals.

• William Barclay is an award-winning political theorist and policy expert, as well as one of Canada’s foremost young conservative voices. Follow him on Twitter/X @WillBarclayPCBG.