Is the Democratic Party Trying to Give Up Power?

The Democratic Party is fighting itself with a ferocity that, in the columnist’s view, leaves little room for the public work expected of a governing party. Even people who have voted Democratic throughout their lives are now expressing anger at President Lee Jae Myung and accusing the party of heading toward self-destruction.

The dispute pits two broad camps against each other. Supporters of the president and the “New Lee Jae Myung” group appear to favor moving the party toward the center-right, pushing the People Power Party farther to the right and expanding the Democratic Party’s long-term electoral reach. Their critics, including voices associated with Yoo Si-min, say the president has betrayed commitments to traditional supporters and is forcing out the party’s value-driven core.

The columnist says both camps speak of betrayal and incompatible roots, while disputes over prosecutorial powers, prosecution withdrawals and efforts to extend leadership terms continue to fuel suspicion. The result resembles internal disorder, with anger toward supposed traitors inside the party exceeding hostility toward political opponents.

That internal struggle is unfolding as inequality worsens. A working paper on Korean income inequality found that the pretax income share of the top 1% reached 14.7% in 2022, while the net-wealth Gini coefficient reached 0.625 last March. The gap between housing prices held by the richest and poorest fifths reached 12.8 times at the end of last year.

The column also points to policies that appear to favor wealth holders, including the abolition of the financial investment tax, lower taxation for dividends from high-dividend companies and a higher threshold for comprehensive real-estate taxation. The Yellow Envelope Law expanded bargaining rights for subcontracted and specially employed workers, but the president has also ordered limits on the scope of labor disputes through enforcement rules. A proposed Basic Act on Working People could help those outside labor-law protections, although the columnist warns that its largely declarative provisions might reinforce their exclusion from the Labor Standards Act.

The conclusion is blunt: without an independent progressive force capable of challenging the Democratic Party from the left, the party has little incentive to pursue deep social and economic reform.