South Koreans head to the polls on Wednesday to elect mayors and provincial governors in a vote seen as a referendum on President Lee Jae Myung’s popularity and a crucial test for the beleaguered conservative opposition.
Recent surveys suggest that Mr. Lee’s center-left Democratic Party is favored to win a majority of the races, in the first nationwide elections since he took office. Analysts are focusing on what the margin of victory will be.
Four years ago, the conservative People Power Party swept the last local elections in a landslide. Its standing has collapsed since its leader, then President Yoon Suk Yeol, made a widely condemned decision to impose martial law in late 2024. He was eventually removed from office and sentenced to life imprisonment on insurrection charges.
Mr. Lee assumed the presidency a year ago and has since gained popularity, helped by pragmatic diplomacy and an unprecedented rally in the domestic stock market.
Here’s what to know about the elections.
Who’s on the ballot?
Wednesday’s elections determine the mayors of eight major cities and the governors of eight provinces, alongside their council members and school-district superintendents. Voters will also choose officials for smaller cities, counties and big cities’ municipal districts. Parliamentary by-elections will fill 14 vacant National Assembly seats.
The most closely watched contests are the mayoral races in Seoul, the capital, and Busan, the second-largest city. Seoul’s mayor is considered the most powerful elected official after the president. Both incumbents belong to the People Power Party.
“No matter how many races it wins, the Democratic Party cannot claim a decisive victory if it loses both contests — or even just Seoul,” said Heo Jinjae, the research director at Gallup Korea.
A referendum on the president
Mr. Lee’s conservative critics have long cast him as a dangerous radical who would weaken South Korea’s alliance with the United States by appeasing North Korea and China, while distancing the country from Japan. He has surprised many skeptics: Since taking office, he has warmed relations with both Beijing and Tokyo, and negotiated a trade and security deal with the Trump administration.
He has also presided over a booming stock market — the benchmark Kospi index has more than tripled since his inauguration, driven largely by A.I.-fueled demand for South Korean chips. His Democratic Party has enacted widely popular legislation to curb the power of prosecutors and to create a new F.B.I.-like investigative agency. Mr. Lee has also won praise for livestreaming Cabinet meetings, in which he questions and challenges his own ministers on live television.
His approval ratings hover around 65 percent, among the highest of any president in the country’s modern history.
Yet those same high ratings may have bred overconfidence in his party. It advanced a bill that critics said was designed to dismiss the corruption and other criminal charges Mr. Lee faced before his election — charges he has called politically motivated and which have been suspended since he took office. The bill incited a severe backlash, particularly among conservatives.
“Those who support President Lee will vote for his party’s candidates because of the economic and stock market performance and his pragmatic management” of relations with neighboring countries, said Cho Gab-je, a political commentator. “But the Democratic Party’s overreach is also driving some conservatives to express their discontent at the ballot box.”
An opposition in turmoil
For nearly half a century, the conservatives — under various banners — dominated South Korean politics. Since the late 1990s, however, the balance has shifted: The Democratic Party has produced four presidents to the conservatives’ three. Of those three, two were impeached and imprisoned, while the third, though he completed his term, also ended up behind bars.
Since Mr. Yoon’s martial law declaration, the approval ratings of the People Power Party have crumbled, and are now barely half of those of the Democratic Party.
The conservative party’s once-formidable base has withered to a hard-line core, its political stronghold now largely shrunken to the southeastern Daegu-Gyeongbuk region. It remains mired in an internal feud between those who sympathized with Mr. Yoon’s declaration and those who backed his impeachment and demand reform — a struggle likely to intensify depending on the outcome of Wednesday’s polls.
“The conservatives are no longer the mainstream in South Korea; they just don’t realize it,” said Kim Joonil, a political commentator. “If they continue on this path, they will remain a minority party for a long time.”
What else to watch
Mr. Lee’s support remains strongest among South Koreans in their 40s and 50s. In contrast, younger voters — those in their 20s and 30s — have drifted rightward in recent election cycles and are now among his least enthusiastic supporters, even as many older South Koreans have warmed to him since his inauguration.
“Those in their 20s and 30s feel their lives have not yet changed — jobs remain scarce and housing out of reach,” said Mr. Heo of Gallup Korea. “A key question is their voter turnout. Based on surveys so far, their intention to vote appears somewhat lower than in previous local elections.”
